MINROSE GWIN'S most recent books are the novels The Accidentals (William Morrow/HarperCollins), Promise (William Morrow/HarperCollins) and The Queen of Palmyra (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial), a memoir, Wishing for Snow (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial), and Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement (University of Georgia Press).
A native of Tupelo, Mississippi, Minrose has been a writer all of her working life, starting out as a newspaper and wire service reporter and working in Mobile, Atlanta, Nashville, and Knoxville. She has taught as a professor at universities around the country, most recently at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has spent many summers leading creative writing workshops at the University of New Mexico Writers' Conference in Taos and Santa Fe. She lives in Austin, TX, and Albuquerque, NM.
Wearing another hat as a literary critic, she has written four scholarly books, including Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement, and was a coeditor of The Literature of the American South, published by W.W. Norton, and the Southern Literary Journal.
Minrose’s 2019 novel, The Accidentals, has been described by Kirkus Reviews as “an important story about women's reproductive rights and the consequences of limited choices [that] will transport readers to the rural Mississippi of a bygone era.” Writing in Women’s Review of Books, Margaret Randall calls the book “a major work by someone whose earlier novels already marked her as one of this generation’s great novelists.”
The novel follows the lives of two sisters, Grace and June McAlister, whose mother, Olivia, dies from a botched abortion in the pre-Roe vs. Wade South. Finding herself in the small paper mill town of Opelika, Mississippi, Olivia dreams of living a much larger life—seeing Paris and returning to her wartime job at a landing boat factory in New Orleans. As she watches over the birds in her yard, Olivia feels like an “accidental”—a migratory bird blown off course.
Wishing for Snow, Minrose's memoir about the convergence of poetry and psychosis in her mother's life, has been praised by Booklist as "eloquent" and "lyrical"—"a real life story we all need to hear." Originally published by LSU Press, it was reissued as a HarperPerennial paperback in 2011.