Sharing opinions - C. Bio

William H. Coles, MD, MS, has studied fiction in workshops with Jim Shepard, Lee Martin, Peter Ho Davies, Clark Blaise, Nancy Zafris, Elizabeth McCracken, Susan Straight, Karl Iagnemma, Bret Lott, Bharati Mukherjee, Tom Barbash, Lynn Freed, Richard Bausch, Jill McCorkle, John Casey, Margo Livesey, Tony Early, Michael Ray, Tamara Straus, Jill McCorkle, Carol Edgarian, Charles Baxter, Charles D'Ambrosio; studied in semester academic courses with John Biguenet, Noel Polk, David Bottoms; worked with mentors Tom Jenks, Dianne Benedict, Anne Wood, Ben George, Holly MacArthur, and Otonne Ricci; and attended conferences with James Dickey, Michael Cunningham, Jane Smiley, Robert Olen Butler, Joyce Carol Oates, and others.

His work has appeared in the Chattahoochee Review and Miscellany. For eight years he reviewed poetry for the Journal of the American Medical Association and won the Callenwolde Prize (Atlanta) for best poem (”Unwed Girl”).  He was finalist (short story) in the William Faulkner Creative Writing (2007) Competition short listed the novel (2007), previously, placed three times as a semi-finalist for novel (2004, 2005, and 2006), and a finalist (2006) for short story. He won both first and second place (two stories) in the Sandhills Writers’ Competition 2006. In 2008, two stories placed as finalists in the Faulkner Competition, one as three equivalent finalists.  He also wrote scripts for editorials and weekly radio segments on jazz for the NPR affiliate WBFO that were presented on air.  He published Story in Literary Fiction: A Manual for Writer in 2007, and in 2008, Literary Story as an Art Form: A Text for Writers.  He won the Conrad Berens Award Competition for best film on a medical subject.

He is a former ophthalmic surgeon specializing in ocular trauma who lives and writes in North Carolina with his wife who is a pediatric retina surgeon and researcher.  He has served as Department Chairman, State University of New York at Buffalo; Regent for the American College of Surgeons, President Association of University Professors in Ophthalmology.  He has held academic appointments at Louisiana State University, Medical University of South Carolina, Emory University School of Medicine, and State University of New York at Buffalo where he is presently Professor Emeritus. He has lectured internationally on surgery, Georgian antique furniture, and jazz and recently presented the lecture "How Humor Works in Literary Fiction" at Kenyon College in 2009.

Contact: whc8826@gmail.com