Alice McDermott is an American novelist and professor of creative writing. She is best known for her 1998 novel Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award for Fiction. McDermott has written eight novels, including Someone, After This, and The Ninth Hour. She has also written short stories, essays, and reviews for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. McDermott has been awarded numerous honors, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Rome Prize, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature. She currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.