Ted Pelton is a fiction writer and author of four books, including the novels Malcolm & Jack and Bartleby, the Sportscaster, more than 50 published stories, and numerous essays, articles, and reviews. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature and an Isherwood Foundation Fellowship. The nonprofit small press he founded and directed for 15 years, Starcherone Books, served as an important voice in innovative fiction and the growth of small press literary publication in the early 2000s. Dr. Pelton now directs the Creative Writing concentration in English at Tennessee Tech and was instrumental in founding the University's literary magazine, The Iris Review. Honored with an Excellence in Critical Inquiry Instruction award in 2020, he teaches courses in Fiction Writing, The Novel, and both classic and contemporary works of American and World literature. His Topics classes in recent years have included Literature of Black Lives Matter, Beat Generation, and Creative Research. Dr. Pelton has a PhD in English from the University at Buffalo and a Masters in Creative Writing from University of Colorado, Boulder. He will be on non-instructional leave in the Spring of 2023, engaged in new creative writing projects.