Bret Lott

Lott 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.

Bret Lott (born October 8, 1958) is the New York Times best-selling author of more than a dozen books and professor of English at the College of Charleston. He is Crazyhorse magazine's nonfiction editor and leads a study abroad program every summer to Spoleto, Italy.

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1958, Lott 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), Lott 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, Lott joined the English Department at the College of Charleston, where he is now a tenured professor and director of the new MFA program. From 2004 to 2007, Lott was at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge where he was The Southern Review's director and editor. Wanting to return to teaching, he is now at the College of Charleston. Lott and his wife have two sons, Zebulun (and his wife, Maggie, and their two children) and Jacob (and his wife, Sarah).