James Alan McPherson was born in 1943, in Savannah, Georgia. His first story publication came in 1968, when he placed "Gold Coast" in The Atlantic Monthly. The following year, he became a contributing editor for that magazine, and published his first collection, Hue and Cry. He went on to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972, and became the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, for his second collection, Elbow Room. Having taught in a number of schools, including the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Virginia, McPherson settled in 1979 at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he mentored a generation of writers and where he still serves as professor. In 1981, he was awarded one of the first MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants. Over the following years, McPherson has served as a Ploughshares trustee, a panelist for the Whiting Foundation, and a contributing editor for Doubletake. More recently, McPherson was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He published Crabcakes, a memoir, in 1996, followed in 2000 by A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile, a collection of essays, and was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2002.