Bruce McAllister

He told Neilson that as a child he had a sea-shell collection of more than 2000 specimens. This interest appears in his fiction, notably in two 2010 stories, "Heart of Hearts" and "The Courtship of the Queen."

He taught literature and writing at the University of Redlands in southern California for twenty-four years. There, he helped establish and direct the Creative Writing Program, directed both the Professional Writing track of that program and its Communications Internship program, received various teaching and service awards, and was Edith R. White Distinguished Professor of Literature and Writing from 1990 to 1995. Later, he started the company McAllister Coaching, helping writers of books and screenplays with their manuscripts.

Bruce McAllister (born 1946) is an American author of fantasy, science fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. He is known primarily for his short fiction. Over the years his short stories have been published in the major fantasy and science fiction magazines, theme anthologies, college readers, and "year's best" anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2007, guest-edited by Stephen King.

McAllister was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1946. The son of a "peripatetic Navy family," his career-Navy-officer "Pearl-Harbor-survivor father and an underdog-championing anthropologist mother" raised Bruce and his younger brother, Jack, in Washington, D.C., Florida, California, and Italy. McAllister wrote, "The theme of the Outsider, the Other, the Alien in the larger sense, runs through almost all of my fiction. That came from being in a military family, from having a sense of being an outsider..."

McAllister also told Neilson that "One of my ancestors was a guy named John Thomson. Immigrated from Scotland to Ireland, then the US in the 1700s. Wore his kilt till the day he died, outlived five wives, had fifteen children. Maybe the right stuff for a frontier, a New World, but I've always been horrified by the thought of having to live with someone like him. The domestic, family side of Braveheart?" The family story was that their lineage on his father's side went "back to Robert the Bruce, supposedly, and laterally to Ben Franklin, or so they said...along with a Captain McAllister of the Confederate Army." McAllister also thought that his mother "was probably part Native American."