Trivia

After living in San Francisco for several years, he returned to Louisiana as a professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He purchased a six-acre plot on the plantation where he grew up, built a house, and restored the rustic church where he had attended school as a child.

He began working in the fields when he was 8 years old, and attended classes in a church on the plantation where he was born. When he was 15 he moved to Vallejo, California, where his mother and stepfather lived. There he visited a library for the first time. He liked 19th-century Russian writers such as Turgenev and Chekhov, as well as the works of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Willa Cather and Zora Neale Hurston.

Received a MacArthur Fellowship (so-called "genius grant") in 1993.

After serving in the army, he graduated from San Francisco State University, where he published his first stories. He eventually studied with novelist Wallace Stegner at Stanford University. He worked in a post office and a printing shop to support himself.

Awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama in 2013.

Pictured on a nondemominated ("forever") USA commemorative postage stamp in the Black Heritage series, issued 23 January 2023. Price on day of issue was 63¢.