John Edgar Wideman is an American writer, professor at Brown University, and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. Wideman was born on June 14, 1941. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship , graduating in 1966. He also graduated... from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. A widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards, he is the first to win the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice: in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 2000, he won the O. Henry Award for his short story "Weight", published in The Callaloo Journal. Following the publication of the Homewood trilogy, the New York Times proclaimed John Edgar Wideman, "one of America's premier writers of fiction.
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