Janna McMahan

Biography

McMahan was raised in rural Campbellsville, Kentucky. An early reader, she volunteered at her local library when she was eleven, fueling a lifelong desire to write. She earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Kentucky and an M.A. from the University of South Carolina, both in Mass Communications. McMahan spent many years working in public relations. She also served as a ghost writer for a number of business clients. McMahan is a widely published essayist and frequently contributes articles to magazines on visual and literary art. She has taught creative writing, speech writing, rhetoric and mass communication theory.

Awards and recognition

In 1998, McMahan won the South Carolina Fiction Project a literary competition sponsored by the Post and Courier and the South Carolina Arts Commission, for her short story "The Snag". Her short story "Seed Money" won the 2002 Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open and "Pluff Mud" won the 2004 Colossal Short Story Contest, sponsored by the Columbia (South Carolina) Free Times. Surface tension, an unpublished short story collection, was a finalist for the 2010 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and won honorable mention in the 2011 competition for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Surface Tension was also the winner of the Imaginative Writing Award (Betty Gabehart Fiction Prize) from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference in March 2005. McMahan was recently awarded the distinction of Literary Artist of the Year (2013) by Jasper Magazine, an arts publication in South Carolina.

McMahan's novella Decorations was included in the collection Snow Angels which was a Book of the Month Club selection and appeared in the New York Times, USA Today. and Publisher's Weekly bestseller lists. Her novel Calling Home was selected as "Need to Read" by Target Corporation, and The Ocean Inside was nominated for book of the year by the Southern Independent Booksellers Association Sojourner Magazine reviewer, Bobbi Buchanan, praised McMahan's new novel Anonymity: "Intriguing and believable characters are part of what makes Janna McMahan's new novel Anonymity a memorable read". The novel was nominated for the Kentucky Literary Award sponsored by Western Kentucky University and the Southern Kentucky Book Festival. Kentucky novelist, Silas House, wrote of McMahan's work, "Janna McMahan is a natural voice who gracefully walks that tightrope of being both literary and commercial."

Personal life

McMahan currently lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.