Lee Zacharias

Lee Zacharias is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night, three novels, Lessons, At Random*, and Across the Great Lake, and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make. Her new novel, What a Wonderful World This Could Be, will appear in June, 2021 from the Madville Publishing. She is co-editor of the anthology Runaway*, which was also published by Madville.

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, the Phillip H. McMath Book Award in Fiction, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award twice, Southern Humanities Review's Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, Prairie Schooner's Glenna Luschei Award, and Silver Medals in Creative Nonfiction  and Literary Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs). At Random was a finalist in literary fiction for the 2013 International Book Awards, the National Indie Lit Awards, and the USA Best Book Awards.

Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals, including, among others, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, Outdoor Photographer, and Our State. A dozen times her essays have been named Notable Essays of the Year by The Best American Essays, which reprinted her essay "Buzzards" in The Best American Essays 2008. For a decade she served as editor of The Greensboro Review. 

She holds degrees from Indiana University, Hollins College, and the University of Arkansas, and has taught at Princeton University and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she is Emerita Professor of English, as well as many conferences, most recently the Wildacres Writers Workshop. 

The University of North Carolina College of Arts and Sciences, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors, and the Southeast Modern Language Association have all recognized her with awards for teaching excellence.