Gail Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer, born in 1937. Throughout her career, she has published 14 individual novels, as well as two collections of short stories. Godwin was raised in North Carolina, where she gradually picked up her mother's interest in writing. She attended several universities, and while at the University of Iowa, she published her first novel, The Perfectionists.
Throughout her career, Godwin has published many of her shorter stories in magazines like Harper's Esquire and Paris Review. Her two short story collections published were Mr. Bedford and the Muses, published in 1983 and entailing five tails about artists, and Dream Children: Stories, a collection of fifteen stories. In perhaps her best short story, Dream Children, a woman "mystically" finds out she is a mother. Gail Godwin is still active as a writer today.