SESSIONS, Bill

Bill SessionsW. A. (Bill) Sessions, Regents' Professor of English Emeritus at Georgia State University, is the author of the forthcoming authorized biography of Flannery O'Connor as well as the editor of her Prayer Journal, published in November 2013. His articles on Flannery O'Connor have appeared in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, the National Catholic Reporter and Studies in Short Fiction. He has presented papers on Flannery O'Connor at the International Flannery O'Connor Conference at Brigham Young University in 1995, at the American Literature national convention, at the South Central Modern Language Association Conference, and at other conferences and universities.

He also knew O'Connor and was the recipient of several of her letters which were featured in the collection titled The Habit of Being.

He is a scholar of British literature, a published poet, and a playwright. Sessions has authored several books on famous writers, including Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey, and Sir Francis Bacon and myriad articles on famous writers and their works. The Founding Editor of The Carolina Quarterly (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Studies in the Literary Imagination (Georgia State University), he has won numerous awards, including the Nikos Kazantzakis Medal from Greece, the Outstanding Teacher Award for the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English and an honorary degree from Coastal Carolina University. His poetry has been published in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and The Chattahoochee Review, among others. He has written several plays, including A Shattering of Glass, a winner in the Southern Theatre Playwrights Competition and produced at the University of Mississippi for the Festival of Southern Theatre.