Kevin Wilson Books in Order

Kevin Wilson grew up in Winchester, Tennessee, in a family that encouraged imagination and storytelling. He was a serious reader early on, but he did not arrive at college with a settled plan to become a writer. For him, books were also a way to make sense of other people, which still feels central to the fiction he writes.

A high-school humanities program gave him an early nudge. Then, while studying at Vanderbilt University, he took a fiction workshop with Tony Earley and realized he wanted to keep writing.

Wilson earned his bachelor's degree from Vanderbilt and later completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Florida. Before his books found a wide audience, he published stories in magazines and worked around the world of literary writing and teaching. His short fiction has appeared in places including Ploughshares, One Story, and The Southern Review.

His first book, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, arrived in 2009. The collection introduces a pattern that runs through much of his work: a wild premise, a little deadpan humor, and characters dealing with grief, fear, family pressure, or loneliness. It received both the Shirley Jackson Award and an Alex Award.

Then came The Family Fang, his first novel. It follows adult siblings Annie and Buster, who were raised as unwilling helpers in their performance-artist parents' public stunts. The book turns a funny, uncomfortable family setup into a story about childhood, art, and the hard work of becoming your own person. It was later adapted into a film.

Families keep showing up in Wilson's books, though rarely in their neatest form. In Perfect Little World, a young mother joins an experiment in communal child-rearing. Nothing to See Here sends a stalled-out woman to care for twins who catch fire when upset. The strange details matter, but the real concern is usually care: who takes responsibility, who gets left out, and how people can make room for one another.

He has a knack for taking something impossible seriously.

Now Is Not the Time to Panic returns to rural Tennessee for a story about two lonely teenagers, an anonymous poster, and a secret that follows one of them into adulthood. In Run for the Hills, half siblings who barely know one another set out to find the father who abandoned them. Across the novels and story collections, readers tend to find awkward humor, vulnerable people, and emotional stakes hiding inside very odd circumstances.

Wilson lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, poet Leigh Anne Couch, and their sons. He is an associate professor in the English and Creative Writing Department at the University of the South.

He writes about people trying to build a life from the mess they were handed.