Richard John McCann was a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he was a longtime professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. A gay writer, he is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a collection of linked stories that novelist Michael Cunningham has described as unbearably beautiful. It won the 2005 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares and was also an American Library Association Stonewall Book Award recipient, as well as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Amazon named it one of the Top 50 Books of 2005.