Jill McCorkle Biography

Jill McCorkle

Jill McCorkle was born in 1958 in Lumberton, a small town in rural southeastern North Carolina. Her father was a postal worker and her mother was a medical secretary. The small town life was a big influence on her storytelling. “I almost always start out in a town that looks a lot like Lumberton in about 1963,” she says. “Somehow those early memories in my childhood, the places I loved in the town, the people I loved in the town, really shaped my whole sense of society.”

She graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1980, where she studied creative writing with Max Steele, Lee Smith, and Louis Rubin, who is often credited with establishing Southern fiction as a recognized area of study within American literature. She went on to Hollins College to earn a master’s degree in writing in 1981.

Soon thereafter, at age 26, she made literary history with the simultaneous 1984 publication of her first two novels, The Cheer Leader and July 7th. Of these novels, The New York Times Book Review said: “One suspects the author of The Cheer Leader is a born novelist. With July 7th, she is also a full grown one.”

Her other books include five additional novels: Tending to Virginia, 1987; Ferris Beach, 1990; Carolina Moon, 1996; Life After Life, 2013; Hieroglyphics, 2020; and five collections of short stories Crash Diet, 1992; Final Vinyl Days and Other Stories, 1998; Creatures of Habit, 2003; Going Away Shoes, 2009; and Old Crimes: Stories, 2024.

McCorkle has received the New England Booksellers Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and the Thomas Wolfe Prize. Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books and four of her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories. She was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2018.

Upon her marriage to Dr. Daniel Shapiro, a graduate of the University of North Carolina medical school, McCorkle moved to Boston, where she raised their children, Claudia and Robert. She taught at Tufts University from 1987 to 1989 and at Harvard University, where she held the Briggs Copeland Lectureship, from 1992 to 1997. She later joined the faculty of Bennington College to teach fiction writing as one of the original core faculty members of the MFA program. She was also the Frannie Hurst Visiting Writer at Brandeis University and the 2002 Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is a frequent instructor at the Sewanee Summer Writers Program.

When she lived in New England, she said, she put novel writing aside to focus on teaching and raising her children. “I felt like the work would still be there, but the big ballet recital or Little League game wouldn’t be,” she said. “It was really important to me to be present, with the idea that I would get my turn.”

After divorcing her first husband, McCorkle returned to North Carolina in 2006 to teach creative writing at North Carolina State University for many years. She remarried and lives on a restored 60-acre farm in Hillsborough, North Carolina. She recently retired from full-time teaching, but continues to conduct writing workshops.

McCorkle’s fiction is influenced by the strong sense of place that characterizes the work of the 1920’s and 1930’s Southern Renaissance writers such as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. The second generation of twentieth century southern writers, including women such as Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers, is even more influential on McCorkle’s work. The sense of place, as well as the distinctive voice and humor found in these writers’ work, characterizes her long and short fiction.

Sources:

North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame Profile.

Jillmccorkle.com

Louisa J. Dang, “Jill McCorkle Writing Home," Our State Magazine, March 2010.

Sylvia Brownrigg, “What Parents Leave Behind Then They Die,” New York Times, August 5, 2020.

Stephen Kurutz, “Nesting is Better Back Home,” New York Times, April 3, 2013.