John Casey

Casey studied law at Harvard before abandoning it for the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he studied under Kurt Vonnegut, and later joined the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he taught creative writing for decades.

Spartina (1989), his second novel, follows Dick Pierce, a proud, financially desperate Rhode Island fisherman building his own boat by hand while a hurricane, an affair, and his own pride threaten to undo him, rendered with a sailor's exact, loving knowledge of boats and water; it won the National Book Award in 1989.

He has continued writing fiction centered on New England's working coastline, including a sequel following Spartina's characters decades later, while remaining closely associated with Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay.