Randi Davenport

Randi Davenport is the author of The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes: A Mother's Story (Algonquin, 2010), a winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Prize for Creative Non-fiction and a finalist for a Books for a Better Life award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in publications like The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The Ontario Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review, among others. She studied history and creative writing at William Smith College, where she earned her B.A she later earned both an MA in Creative Writing/Fiction and a PhD in literature at Syracuse University, where she won the university-wide prize for best doctoral dissertation of the year. She has been a Summer Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Public Fellow at the Institute for Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has taught literature and writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others. She is currently the Executive Director of the James M. Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.