Distinguished Writers in Residence

Josephine Humphreys

Josephine Humphreys is the author of Dreams of Sleep, which won the 1985 Hemingway Foundation Award for a first work of fiction; Rich in Love, which was made into a major motion picture; The Fireman's Fair; and, most recently, Nowhere Else on Earth. She is most noted for her sensitive evocations of family life in the southern United States.

Humphreys studied creative writing with Reynolds Price at Duke University and attended Yale University and the University of Texas. From 1970 to 1977, before beginning her writing career, she taught at Baptist College in Charleston.

In 1994, Humphreys coauthored the autobiography of Ruthie Bolton (a pseudonym), a previously unpublished Charleston woman whose adolescent years were marked by abandonment and abuse. The book, Gal: A True Life, is noted for its straightforward narration of her disturbing childhood and early adulthood and the encouragement of Bolton's strength to overcome her past. A former Guggenheim Fellow and a winner of the Lyndhurst Prize, Humphreys lives in Charleston, S.C., where she was born.