Join the Knoxville Writers' Guild
today!
Jeanne
McDonald
Jeanne McDonald, the Knoxville Writers' Guild second president, has published fiction in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including American Fiction, Special Report: Fiction, Memphis Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, Poets & Writers, Phoebe, Amelia, Kentucky Writing, and River City Review. Her work has been anthologized in Homewords: A Book of Tennessee Writers and Homeworks; Lovers: Stories by Women; Love's Shadow: Writings by Women; Worlds in our Words: Contemporary Women Writers; and Christmas Blues.
She is a contributing editor for Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s alternate news magazine, has edited two writing collections for the Knoxville Writers’ Guild, and has co-authored two books of nonfiction with her husband, Fred Brown: Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers and The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith, which won the Harry Caudill Award for Journalistic Reporting. She is a recipient of the Tennessee Arts Commission/Alex Haley Fiction Fellowship and many other awards, including a Washington Prize in Fiction, a National Writers Assn. Prize for its 2001 NWA Novel Contest, and a nonfiction publication award from the National League of American Pen Women. She also edited the KWG's first anthology, Voices from the Valley (1994) and in July of 1998, The Voice of Memory: A Collection of Memoirs.
McDonald grew up in Norfolk, Va., and graduated with honors from the College of William and Mary with a degree in English literature. She taught English for several years before coming to Koxville in the 1960s. She has an essay published in Women Writing in Appalachia (2003) and her novel, Water Dreams, was published by the University Press of Mississippi in September, 2003. McDonald was honored by the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2007.
She has three grown children and a three-year-old granddaughter and lives in Knoxville, where she continues to write in an "aerie in the woods" in the new house she and her husband recently built by the lake. She is currently working on a new novel, a collection of short stories and several non-fiction magazine pieces. In addition, she and her husband are planning another non-fiction project together.