Conversations with Ellen Gilchrist

Known for her short stories populated by a recurring cast of headstrong, honest, and sometimes outrageous Southern women characters, Ellen Gilchrist’s (1935–2024) four decades of writing and twenty-six works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry solidly place her among the South’s most enduring authors.

After winning a National Book Award in 1984 for the short story collection Victory Over Japan, she was a weekly commentator on NPR’s then-new Morning Edition. While she wrote six critically accl...