Hal Crowther—currently a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Commentary—is a graduate of Williams College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a media columnist, a film, drama and television critic, a staff writer and editor for publications such as the Buffalo News, Time, Newsweek, The Humanist and Free Inquiry magazines. He has also been a regular contributor to the book pages of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 1992 his syndicated column received the Baltimore Sun's H. L. Mencken Writing Award, the first weekly column honored, and in 1998 it won the American Association of Newsweeklies first prize for commentary, shared with Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice. "Dealer's Choice," Crowther's column on southern letters and culture, has been featured in The Oxford American since 1994. He also writes a column for The Progressive Populist, out of Austin, Texas. His collections of essays include Unarmed But Dangerous (1995), and most recently, Cathedrals of Kudzu, A Personal Landscape of the South (2000). Cathedrals of Kudzu won the Lillian Smith Book Award for Commentary, the 1999-2001 Fellowship Prize for Non-Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the 2001 first prize for essays from Foreword Magazine. Crowther received the 2000 Russell J. Jandoli Award for Excellence in Journalism from St. Bonaventure University. His essays have been published in many anthologies, most recently Novello: Ten Years of Great American Writing (2000). Crowther lives in North Carolina with his wife, the novelist Lee Smith.  

Photo by Susan Woodley Raines