Ron Tanner has published stories in such magazines as The IowaReview, the Massachusetts Review, the Literary Review, Story Quarterly, and dozens of others. His work has been anthologized in Best of the West, the Pushcart Prizes, and Twenty Under Thirty: Early Work of America's Influential Writers. Awards for his short fiction include a James Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, first prize in the New Letters national fiction competition, gold medal in the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society national competition for short fiction, and many others. His first collection of short stories, A Bed of Nails, won the first-annual G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize, sponsored by BkMk Press at he University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The judge of that competition--Janet Burroway--wrote: Ron Tanner is fabulously imaginative, experimental, witty, often breath-taking. The series of 'Revolutionary Militia' stories that thread the collection, and that are not science fiction so much as eco-fiction, have an eerie convincingness. Both male and female voices are handled beautifully . . . . more

Although born in California, Ron grew up mostly in North Carolina, where family from both sides were born and raised. Most of his relatives hail from Caldwell County, in the Carolina hills, and many of them still gather for a reunion every October in North Wilkesboro. Ron's father was the wild-card, an electrical engineer recruited by Western Electric to do missile research for Bell Labs in the 1950s-70s. This compelled his family to travel fairly widely, at one point re-locating to an island in the mid-Pacific for two years. They returned to North Carolina when Ron was a teenager. He earned his B.A. in English, with Honors in Creative Writing, from the Univeristy of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

He knew he wanted to write but wasn't sure how to go about it, so he traveled around the country, taking odd jobs that included stints as a door-to-door salesman, a yardman, and a customs clearance clerk, among other things. Frustrated with the daily grind, he became a professional club musician in the California honky-tonk and casino circuits, playing drums and singing five-six nights a week. He did this for six years, trying to write in his free time. As soon as he published his first story (in the Indiana Review), he applied to graduate schools--never having heard of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where everyone told him to go.

Once at Iowa, he realized his love of teaching and decided to pursue a Ph.D. so that he could teach at the college level. After earning a Ph.D. in American Lit. and Creative Writng from the Unviersity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he taught for two years as an instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond, VA. Then he took a tenure-track job in the Writing Department at Loyola College, in Baltimore, Maryland. He is now the chair of that department.

He lives in Baltimore--with his wife and their many pets--in a large Victorian brownstone that was a delapidated, former frat house when they found it in 1999. After several years of intensive work, they have revived the house. In his free time, Ron works on the house, collects old books, haunts flea markets for antiques, and plays drums in his six-piece jazz band, Jazz Caravan.

READ BOOK-MARK PRESS INTERVIEW WITH RON TANNER
READ DZANC BOOKS INTERVIEW WITH RON TANNER