Beloved writer and teacher Doris Betts is a Statesville, North Carolina native and attended UNC-Greensboro, where she was Phi Beta Kappa. During her student days she won the Mademoiselle Magazine college fiction award and a Putnam award for her collection of short stories, The Gentle Insurrection. She is currently on the English Department faculty of UNC-Chapel Hill, where she served as Assistant Dean of the Honor Program from 1978-1981 and where she holds the title of alumni distinguished professor.

Ms. Betts has won three Sir Walter Raleigh awards, the Southern Book Award, the North Carolina Award for Literature, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal for the short story, among other recognitions. "The Ugliest Pilgrim," the most widely printed of her stories, was the basis of a musical that won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and later became an Academy Award winner as a short film entitled "Violet." Her Souls Raised from the Dead was on the New York Times list of top twenty best books in 1994. Among her many other acclaimed works are The Astronomer and Other Stories, Beast of the Southern Wild and Other Stories, and The Scarlet Thread.

Ms. Betts lives in Pittsboro with her husband, retired judge Lowry Betts. The Writers' Network's annual Doris Betts Fiction Prize is one more tribute to this extraordinary writer.