James Alan McPherson

James Alan McPherson (September 16, 1943 – July 27, 2016) was an American essayist and short-story writer. He was born in Savannah, Georgia.
He was the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was included among the first group of artists who received a MacArthur Fellowship. At the time of his death, McPherson was a professor emeritus of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
McPherson died in hospice on July 27, 2016, in Iowa City, Iowa, due to complications of pneumonia. He was 72.