James Alan Mcpherson

James Alan McPherson, an essayist, short-story writer and critic, is among the generation of African American writers and intellectuals who were inspired and mentored by Ralph Ellison. Ralph Ellison was a highly acclaimed scholar and writer. Ellison used racial issues to express universal dilemmas of identity and self-discovery, but didn’t use his writing as a propaganda tool to heighten his people. "Literature is colorblind," he once said “and it should be read and judged in a larger framework.” Many writers disagreed with his beliefs, but McPherson, like Ellison, sees African American culture as integrally connected with the "white" culture. McPherson doesn’t consider himself a "black writer", but rather compares himself to other practitioners of the American short fiction. Even though his writing is drawn from his experiences as a black man, he rejects the notion that black or white fiction must necessarily concern certain black or white topics.

James Alan McPherson was born September 16, 1943, in Savannah, Georgia. He attended Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1963 to 1964 and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Morris Brown College in Atlanta in 1965. Afterwards with the intention of becoming a lawyer he attended Harvard University Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, and the Yale University Law School in New Haven, Connecticut. He also earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa in 1969. He has taught at a variety of institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz; Harvard University; the University of Virginia; and the University of Iowa, where he is currently a professor of English in the Writers' Workshop. McPherson was also given the opportunity to lecture in Japan at Meiji University and Chiba University.