Pinckney Benedict grew up on his family's dairy farm Greenbrier County, West Virginia.

He has published two collections of short fiction (Town Smokes and The Wrecking Yard) and a novel (Dogs of God), all of which were named “Notable Books” by the New York Times Book Review.

His stories have appeared in, among other magazines and anthologies, Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, StoryQuarterly, Ontario Review, the O. Henry Award series (twice), the Pushcart Prize series (three times, most recently in the 2008 volume)), the New Stories from the South series (twice, with a third appearance upcoming in the 2008 volume), and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories.

He is the recipient, among other prizes, of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Literary Fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts, a Fiction Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, a Michener Fellowship from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award (for which he has also recently served, with Amy Hempel and Lynn Freed, as a judge), and Britain’s Steinbeck Award.

He has a novel (Wild Bleeding Heart) and a story collection (Miracle Boy and Other Stories) forthcoming from Nan A. Talese Books/Doubleday.

He is the founder and director, along with Fred Leebron, of the Tinker Mountain Writers’ Workshop, the annual summer conference at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. He has taught on the creative writing faculties at Oberlin College, Ohio State University, Princeton University, and Hollins University.

He is co-editor, with his wife, the novelist Laura Benedict, of the 2007 anthology Surreal South, which promises to be the first in an ongoing biennial series. He serves as a professor in the English Department at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.