Les Edgerton is an American author of nineteen books, including two about writing fiction: Finding Your Voice and Hooked. He also writes short stories, articles, essays, novels, and screenplays.
Awards and recognition
Edgerton's fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award, Jesse Jones Award, PEN/Faulkner Award, the Derringer Award, and the Violet Crown Book Award. One of his screenplays was a semifinalist for the Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Program, a finalist in the Austin Film Festival Heart of Film Screenplay Competition, and a finalist in the Writer's Guild's "Best American Screenplays" Competition. His short fiction has appeared in Houghton Mifflin's Best American Mysteries of 2001, "The South Carolina Review", Kansas Quarterly, Arkansas Review, North Atlantic Review, "High Plains Literary Review", Chiron Review, Murdaland, and many others. His thriller, "The Bitch" was named the Best Thriller of 2011 by Preditors & Editors, and was nominated for Best Thriller of 2011 by Spinetingler Magazine.
Biography
Les Edgerton was born in Odessa, Texas. He grew up in Freeport, Texas and in and around South Bend, Indiana. He served four years in the U.S. Navy. Later, he was sentenced to two to five years in Pendleton Reformatory for second-degree burglary. Four years after getting out of prison, he attended Indiana University South Bend, where he was elected Student Body President, was sports editor for the campus newspaper, and was head of the student athletic association, which began the school's first basketball team. He later earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Later Edgerton entered a period of his life he refers to as a years-long odyssey, during which he:
Sold and used drugs
Worked for an escort service for older, wealthy women in New Orleans
Co-hosted a cable-television show about fashion in New Orleans
Made a television commercial
Acted in a movie
Was homeless and eating out of a dumpster
Went through several marriages
Attended A.A. meetings
Began writing seriously
For more than twenty years he has lived in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. He has a wife, a son, two grown daughters, and a grandson. Today, in his own words, "... he's all respectable and such, and you can invite him into your home and when he leaves you don't have to worry about counting the silverware." Edgerton's current activities include working his private online creating writing group and coaching writers privately on their novels.
