Hal Crowther is an award-winning critic and essayist, a journalist whose work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, Granta, and Narrative magazines, among many others, and in the Oxford American, where his column "Dealer's Choice" was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. His columns and reviews have been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Spectator, and many independent weeklies and journals. A recipient of the Baltimore Sun's Mencken Award for Writing, he is the author of four essay collections and An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken. His most recent collection was Freedom Fighters and Hellraisers (Blair, 2018). For his third collection of essays, Gather at the River, he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism. He lives in Hillsborough, NC, with his wife, novelist Lee Smith.