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Gail Kathleen Godwin (born June 18, 1937 ) is an American novelist and short story writer. She has published one non-fiction work, two collections of short stories, and eleven novels, three of which have been nominated for the National Book Award and five of which have made the New York Times Bestseller List. Godwin was born in Birmingham, Alabama but raised in Asheville, North Carolina by her divorced mother and grandmother. She attended Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina (a women's college founded by Presbyterians in 1857) from 1955 to 1957, but graduated with a B.A. in Journalism from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1959. She worked briefly as a reporter for the Miami Herald and married a Herald photographer named Douglas Kennedy. After the job and the marriage finished (by firing and by divorce, respectively), she worked as waitress back home in North Carolina to save money to travel to Europe. In the early 1960s, Godwin worked for the U.S. Travel Service at the U.S. Embassy in London and wrote novels and short stories in her spare time. She returned to the United States and worked briefly as an editorial assistant at the Saturday Evening Post before attending the University of Iowa, earning her M.A. (1968) and PhD (1971) in English Literature there. Godwin's body of work has garnered many honors, including three National Book Award nominations, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Five of her novels have been on the New York Times best seller list. Godwin lives and writes in Woodstock, New York.
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