John Dufresne was born on January 30, 1948, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas in 1984. A prolific writer of both novels and books on craft, Dufresne has published seven works of fiction and six guides on how to improve writing and finish a debut novel. His own, Louisiana Power and Light (1994), made the New York Times' notable books of the year list, as did his second, Love Warps the Mind a Little (1997). Over the course of his career, his novels have won prizes ranging from the Yankee Magazine award for fiction to the Transatlantic Review/Henfield Foundation Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction award. Dufresne was also awarded the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2012. Outside of fiction, Dufresne has also written plays and short story collections, with two additional prize-winning screenplays entitled Freezer Jesus (2002) and To Live and Die in Dixie (2008) being adapted into short films. He is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University.
#1: Still frame from Pryor Center video interview with John Dufresne at the Laurie Merlee Ceramics Studio; Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2011
© Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas
#2: Still frame from Pryor Center video interview with John Dufresne at the Laurie Merlee Ceramics Studio; Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2011
© Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas
#3: Still frame from Pryor Center video interview with John Dufresne at the Laurie Merlee Ceramics Studio; Fayetteville, Arkansas, 2011
© Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, University of Arkansas
