CLARENCE MAJOR is a novelist, poet and painter. His novels include 'Dirty Bird Blues' (a Penguin Classic), 'Such Was the Season', a Literary Guild selection; 'My Amputations', winner of the Western States Book Award; 'Painted Turtle: Woman with Guitar', a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and other novels. He has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Harvard Review, and dozens of other periodicals.
Major has been awarded a 2016 PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2015 "Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts" by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Council on the Arts Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Award finalist. He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis.
Major has been awarded a 2016 PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award, a 2015 "Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts" by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Council on the Arts Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Book Award finalist. He was elected to The Georgia State Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth century American literature at the University of California at Davis.
