Mississippi-born writer and professor Lewis Alfonso Nordan (1939 –2012) earned his bachelor’s degree in 1963 at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, a master’s degree in 1966 from Mississippi State University, and a PhD in 1973 from Auburn University. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair. The collection established him as a writer in the Southern tradition of William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Flannery O'Connor. It also established a place for Nordan's fiction, the fictional town of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, a small community in the Mississippi Delta based loosely on Nordan's hometown of Itta Bena, Mississippi. After the short-story collection, he published The All-Girl Football Team (1986) followed by Music of the Swamp (1991), his first novel. Nordan's second novel, Wolf Whistle (1993), won the Southern Book Award and gained him a wider audience. The book deals with the murder of Emmett Till, an African American teenager killed in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. Nordan published a number of other works that include The Sharpshooter Blues (1995), Lightning Song (1997), and a "fictional memoir," Boy With Loaded Gun (2000). He held faculty positions at the University of Georgia and the University of Arkansas before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburg in 1983, where he worked until his retirement in 2005.