Born in Hendersonville, North Carolina, Robert Morgan grew up on his family’s farm and wrote his first short story in the sixth grade at the prompting of a teacher. During college, after a professor said reading one of Morgan’s stories moved him to tears, Morgan transferred from North Carolina State University, where he was studying mathematics and engineering, to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in English. He began encouraging young writers himself when he accepted a teaching position at Cornell University in 1971. Since then, Morgan has made his academic home at Cornell in Ithaca, New York, on the northern edge of Appalachia, but his creative home is the southern mountains of his boyhood and young adult years....
