Internationally acclaimed novelist and critic Eric Miles Williamson was named by France’s Transfuge magazine one of the “douze grands écrivains du monde”—one of the twelve great authors of the world. His first novel, East Bay Grease, was a PEN/Hemingway finalist, and its sequel, Welcome to Oakland, was named the second-best novel of 2009 and one of the top 40 novels of the decade by the Huffington Post. Senior Editor of Boulevard, Fiction Editor of Texas Review, and Associate Editor of American Book Review, Williamson served three terms on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in the Rio Grande Valley.