David Madden was founding director of the United States Civil War Center from 1992 to 1999 and is now LSU Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing, Emeritus. He served on the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Advisory Board and was Louisiana Commissioner for the Bicentennial. He has published many books of nonfiction, including four on the Civil War. He has also published eleven novels, including Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War, and three books of short stories, including his latest, The Last Bizarre Tale. His book of stories, The Shadow Knows, won a National Council on the Arts Award, and The Suicide's Wife was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a CBS movie. Madden has lectured on the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, fiction, and a wide variety of other subjects, and given dramatic readings of his fiction at more than two hundred colleges and conferences. A native of east Tennessee, he now lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina.