A recipient of a National Endowment of Arts Fellowship in literature and a Fulbright to teach and research in Hungary, Margaret McMullan is the author of nine award-winning books.

Margaret’s novels include When Warhol Was Still Alive, Aftermath Lounge, In My Mother’s House, a Pen/Faulkner nominee; Cashay, a Chicago Public Library Teen Book Selection; and When I Crossed No-Bob, a Parents’ Choice Silver Honor, a School Library Journal Best Book, an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, a Booklist Best Book For Young Adults, and a Mississippi Center for the Book selection at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Both When I Crossed No-Bob and How I Found the Strong won the Mississippi Arts and Letters Award for Best Fiction, the Indiana Best Young Adult Book, and they are both New York Public Library A-List Books for Teens. How I Found the Strong was also named an American Library Association Notable Social Studies Book, and a Booklist’s Top Ten First Novel for Youth. Sources of Light is an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, a Best Book of Indiana, and a Chicago Public Library Teen Selection. Margaret won the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award in 2011. In 2015, Margaret teamed up with Phillip Lopate to curate Every Father’s Daughter, an anthology of essays about fathers by great women writers such as Alice Munro, Ann Hood, and Jane Smiley. Read her newest book, a memoir based on her research in Hungary, Where The Angels Lived: One Family’s Story of Loss, Exile, and Return. 

Margaret’s work has appeared in USA Today, The Washington Post, The Hill, The Bulwark, The Huffington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Herald, Glamour, The Millions, The Morning Consult, The Morning News, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Ploughshares, Southern Accents, Deep South Magazine, StorySouth, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, Other Voices, Boulevard, The Arkansas Review, The Montréal Review, National Geographic for Kids, Southern California Anthology, Southern Accents, and The Sun among other journals and anthologies such as Christmas Stories from the South’s Best Writers. A 2007 Eudora Welty Visiting Writer at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, Margaret has taught in the Low-Residency MFA programs at Converse College, Stony Brook Southampton Writers Conference, Eastern Kentucky University, University of Southern Indiana’s Ropewalk Writers Retreat, and at Word Theatre’s Writing Retreat in Edale, England. She was the Melvin Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Evansville, where she taught for 25 years.

She currently serves on the National Advisory Board of the Eudora Welty Foundation, Mississippi Today, the Mississippi Center for Justice, and Tougaloo College. She also serves on the advisory board for the Mississippi Book Festival and the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. She founded the McMullan Young Writers Workshop at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, a summer program which provides scholarships to underserved high school students. Margaret is a member of the International Women’s Forum and the Author’s Guild. She has served as a judge for the NEA, the Fulbright organization and for the Scholastic Writing awards. In 2015, Margaret and her husband, filmmaker Patrick O’Connor began the One Book, One Pass all community reading program in Pass Christian, Mississippi, where they live and work full time.

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