C.J. Hribal arrived at St. Norbert thinking he might like to be a writer/photographer for National Geographic, but after taking a fiction-writing course he discovered his calling. With the guidance of his adviser and the English faculty, C.J. created what at the time was an independent major, creative writing, and after graduation attended Syracuse University, where he studied under the late Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff.

Stints in bookstores and hotels followed. C.J.’s first collection of short stories and novellas, Matty’s Heart, received a Writer’s Choice Award from the Pushcart Foundation. After publishing his first novel, American Beauty, he became a faculty member at Memphis State University, and two years later joined the faculty at Marquette University.

C.J.’s second collection of short fiction, The Clouds in Memphis, won the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and he also edited The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. Over his writing career C.J. has held Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Bush Foundation and from The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

C.J. is now a professor of English at Marquette University, and is a member of the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. His most recent book, which won the Anne Powers Book Award, is the novel The Company Car.