Bret Lott

Bret Lott (born October 8, 1958) is the New York Times best-selling author of more than a dozen books including Jewel, an Oprah Book Club selection. From 1986 to 2004 he was writer-in-residence and professor of English at the College of Charleston, leaving to take the position of editor and director of the journal The Southern Review at Louisiana State University. In 2007, he returned to the College of Charleston, where he currently teaches. He serves as nonfiction editor of Crazyhorse and leads a study abroad program every summer to Spoleto, Italy.

Bret was appointed to the National Council of the Arts by President George W. Bush and served a six-year term. He was a Fulbright Senior American Scholar in 2006 and writer-in-residence at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel. He was invited by Laura Bush to speak at the White House as part of the White House Symposium on “Classic American Stories” in 2004.

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1958, Bret grew up in Buena Park, California and Phoenix, Arizona, before returning to California to live in Huntington Beach. He met and married his wife of 30+ years, Melanie Swank Lott, at First Baptist Church of Huntington Beach/Fountain Valley. A graduate of Cal State Long Beach (1981), Bret and Melanie headed to Massachusetts for graduate school at UMass Amherst. He received his MFA in 1984 and landed his first teaching position at Ohio State University. In 1986 he started teaching at the College of Charleston in the English Department where he is now a tenured professor and director of the new MFA program. From 2004 to 2007, Bret served as Editor and Director of The Southern Review at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, but his heart was in teaching and he happily returned to the College of Charleston. Bret and Melanie have two grown sons, Zebulun (and his wife, Maggie, and their two children) and Jacob (and his wife, Sarah).

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