Minrose Gwin has been a writer all of her working life, starting out as a newspaper and wire service reporter and working in Mobile, Atlanta, Nashville, and Knoxville. She was a finalist for the 2010 Julia Peterkin Award, and The Queen of Palmyra, her first novel, was selected as a finalist for the 2010 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. The Queen of Palmyra was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick and an IndieBound Notable book. The Women’s National Book Association selected it as one of 13 “Great Group Reads” for 2010. It was hailed by Lee Smith as “the most powerful and also the most lyrical novel about race, racism, and denial in the American South since To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Jill McCorkle calls it “a brilliant and compelling novel ….The beauty of the prose, the strength of voice and the sheer force of circumstance will hold the reader spellbound from beginning to end.”

Wishing for Snow, Minrose’s memoir about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life has been praised by Booklist as “eloquent” and “lyrical”—“a real life story we all need to hear.”  Published in 2004, it is being reissued as a Harper Perennial paperback. As a literary critic, she has written three scholarly books (one a CHOICE book of the year) and is a coeditor of The Literature of the American South, published by W.W. Norton, and the Southern Literary Journal. 

Minrose teaches literature and creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is working on a book on Mississippi civil rights activist Medgar Evers and a collection of stories called Sweethearts.