Mark Powell is the author of four novels—Prodigals and Blood Kin (2002 and 2006), and The Dark Corner and The House of the Lord (both forthcoming in 2012)—and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the Collegeville Center for Ecumenical Research, and the Vaclav Havel fellowship in playwriting to the Prague Seminar. He holds an MAR in Religion and Literature from Yale Divinity School and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Carolina, and has served as a craft class instructor at Breadloaf and repeatedly on the faculty of the Appalachian Writers’ Conference. For the past three years he has taught a fiction workshop at Lawtey Correctional Institute, a Level II prison in Raiford, Florida. Prodigals was nominated for the VCU First Novel Award, and Blood Kin received the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in a number of journals, including Still, Ellipsis, Rivendell, The New Delta Review, Appalachian Heritage, American Polymath, The South Carolina Review, and Yemassee. In 2010, he received the Chaffin Award for contributions to Appalachian Literature. He will be the featured artist in the Winter 2012 issue of Appalachian Heritage. The issue will feature two excerpts from The Dark Corner as well as a critical appraisal of his previous work.