Rebecca Godwin has two published novels, Keeper of the House (St. Martin’s, 1994, continuously in print since 1994, several times optioned for film) and Private Parts (Longstreet, 1992). Her stories and essays have appeared in Paris Review, Oxford American’s Best of the South issue, South Carolina Review, The Sun, and elsewhere. She has received MacDowell and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. One of her first stories won the South Carolina Fiction Project and is included in Inheritance (Hub City Press, 2001), an anthology of the best of that series. She has served as judge for the SC Fiction Project, and multiple times as screening judge for the Drue Heinz Prize and The Atlantic’s Student Writing Prizes.

She’s had a crazy-quilt career: secretary in a South Carolina steel mill for 12 years and eight years as co-owner of a real estate agency, during which 20 years she also attended college and graduate school, earning a BA from Coastal Carolina University and an MA from Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English. After a stint as ad agency copywriter, she landed at Bennington College, first as an editor/writer, and by 2002, as a core faculty member teaching writing and literature. She also conceived of and was faculty editor for plain china, an online journal showcasing undergraduate writing from around the country. The anthology was acquired in 2015 by Virginia Commonwealth University, which continues to connect the work of aspiring young writers to their peers and the world beyond (plainchina.org/about/).

Rebecca has returned to her native South Carolina, where she’s finalizing a collection of short stories, "No Place Like Home," a series of interconnected stories spanning the lives of a military family from World War II to 9/11. Individual stories from the series have appeared in Oxford American’s Best of the South series, The Sun, Modern Language Studies, and The Write Launch. Another story, "Egg Timer," won The Broad River Review's 2023 RASH Fiction Prize. In the wings are a novel and another book of stories, one of which was chosen as the 2023 New Millennium Writings First Prize for Prose.

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