Thomas G. Franklin was born in the small southern town of Dickinson, AL, in 1963.  In 1981 he moved with his family to Mobile, AL, and later attended the University of South Alabama in Mobile, where he earned his BA in English.  While attending the University of South Alabama, Tom worked nights at various places.  His fiction has been described as dark and, when you find out about the jobs he has held, you can understand where he has found some of the inspiration his Southern Gothic literary fiction. He was employed as a heavy equipment operator at a sandblasting grit factory,  a construction inspector in a chemical plant,  a clerk at a hospital morgue, and in various jobs at hazardous waste clean-up sites.  After graduating from the University of South Alabama, Franklin earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Arkansas in 1998, then returned to the University of South Alabama to teach.  Shortly after he became the Phillip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University in Lewisburg,  PA and then he moved to Knox College,  where he held the position of visiting Writer-in-Residence.  In 2000, Franklin moved to Oxford, MS, as the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at Ole Miss. There,  he hasi nstructed both undergraduate and graduate students in a two semester fiction writing course.  He and his wife Beth Ann Fennelly maintain a house in Oxford, where she is a member of the English Department.  Winner of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, Franklin taught at Sewanee  during the academic year 2002-2003.

Franklin has been especially successful with his short fiction and essays, which  have been published in numerous magazines including The Chattahoochee Review, Brightleaf, The Nebraska Review, The Texas Review, Quarterly West, and Smoke Magazine, to name a few.  His fiction is in anthologies such as New Stories from the South; The Year's Best, 1999; Best American Mystery Stories, 1999 and 2000; and Best Mystery Stories of the Century.

Franklin has published published three previous books:

Poachers: Stories was published in 1999 by William Morrow. It is a collection of ten short stories set in Alabama.  The title story was recognized with the Edgar Allan Poe Award  for Best Mystery Story. Poachers is also published in British, French, Japanese, and German editions. 

Hell at the Breech,  a novel,  was published by Harper Collins. Also set in Alabama, this time the location is Clarke County, Tom Franklin's childhood home.  The story focuses on a bloody feud which takes place in 1899. For an interview with  Tom on this, his first novel, and how he went about writing it,  go to:

http://www.harpercollins.com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=19243&isbn13=9780060566760&displayType=bookinterview

Book Reporter had this to say about the novel:

In his highly praised short story collection,  Poachers, Alabama native Tom Franklin mined a neglected  topic —the modern South — for narrative gold. He created vivid, visceral stories of present-day losers and rabble-rousers, and presented them as both regular frustrated humans and red-dirt legends. Although his follow-up novel, Hell at the Breech, is set more than 100 years in the past, Franklin's sensibility for gritty Southern realism remains intact and in fact has become one of his defining traits as a regional author. Much like its predecessor, Hell at the Breech refuses to romanticize the South, its inhabitants, or the violence they perpetrate, yet Franklin holds up his male characters as examples and exemplars of various strains of Southern masculinity, examining the morality of bloodshed in all its muscular complexity.

Smonk, a novel was published by Harper Collins.
The Southern Literary Review had this to say about it:

The first four chapters of Smonk surely rank among the most grotesque, savage and compelling fiction  ever written.  Using Alabama in the early 1900s as his setting, Tom Franklin has created two despicably fascinating characters, E.O. Smonk and Evavangeline,  for whom violent and creative self-preservation are as natural as breathing.  These two travel  along separate paths of destruction, sharing some bit players in their storylines, but otherwise remaining oblivious of each other’s existence as they move toward the day of reckoning. Whether they are evil incarnate, as some folks believe, or avenging angels, Franklin does not make clear, because he populates the countryside with enough human and animal detritus to place their actions in proper context.  As bad as they may be, Smonk and Evangeline  are simply the best at playing a game in which survival is the only rule. Franklin sets a frantic pace in the beginning, as the bodies and the indignities against humanity pile up like the carcasses of rabid dogs that litter the land.  Smonk simultaneously repulses and demands rapt attention, appealing not to the prurient interests of pulp fiction  but to the stunned disbelief (of readers that think) that things cannot get any worse…But Smonk delivers more than just a western gore-fest.  Franklin invokes the Book of Revelations, with its demand for unquestioning adherence to the prophet’s law, as a central theme in Smonk.   Is the foundation on which the townspeople of Old Texas, Alabama, have constructed their twisted belief system any more fantastic, any more arbitrary, any more cruel, than the underpinnings of Judeo-Christian faith, he seems to ask without taking a side. Franklin’s writing is tightly packed, but he does not sacrifice imagery for economy.  His physical descriptions of people and place are terse but vivid, and his attention to the details that fill up each scene are cinematic in scope.  Franklin even reveals a deft comedic touch as he relieves the tension with several minor characters, including a dandy from back east who suppresses his sinful lust with self-abuse, and his well-spoken but didactic Negro assistant. If Quentin Tarantino ever wanted to film a western homage to his beloved Sergio Leone, director of Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns like  The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,  he would do well to option Smonk for his screenplay.

In addition to the Edgar Allan Poe award, Franklin has been honored several times for his literary achievements.  In July of 1998,  he won the Writers at Work Literary Nonfiction Contest.  He received the Arkansas Arts Council grant for the short story in August of 1998.  He was also presented with a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship and, of course, the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence for the 2001- 2002 academic year.

Franklin and his wife, the widely published poet and essayist Beth Ann Fennelly, live in Oxford, MS, where she teaches at the University of Mississippi in the English Department.