Howard Waldrop was born in Houston, Mississippi on September 15, 1946 and moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas in 1950. He attended University of Texas at Arlington, spent two years in the Army, and lived briefly in Grand Prairie and Bryan before moving to Austin in 1974 where he has been a member of the well-known Turkey City Writers Workshop along with Bruce Sterling, Leigh Kennedy, Chad Oliver, Lewis Shiner, and others. Howard Waldrop has spent most of his life in Texas, where he says he fishes a lot. He also writes a lot and just happens to be, according to George R. R. Martin, the most startling, original, and entertaining short story writer in science fiction today. He sold his first story to Analog in 1970, and since then he has been widely published in places as diverse as Omni, Playboy, Universe, Crawdaddy, New Dimensions, Shayol, Orbit, and Zoo World . His first novel, The Texas Israeli War: 1999, written in collaboration with fellow Texan Jake Saunders was published in 1974. In 1984 his solo novel, Them Bones, was published as part of the new Ace Specials line.
But it is as a short story writer that Waldrop has made his reputation. Many of his unique and bizarre stories have been published in the collections Howard Who? and All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past . A frequent awards nominee, his story The Ugly Chickens won both the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards in 1981. And his novelette Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance? was a finalist for the 1988 Nebula. Two more books of Waldrop were published in 1988: a short novel entitled A Dozen Tough Jobs ; and a book of collaborations, Custer's Last Jump. Another collection of his stories, Night of the Cooters (the title story was a 1988 Hugo nominee), was published in 1992. Waldrop wrote over two hundred stories and around hundred of them were published to date.
From the guide to the Inventory of the Howard Waldrop Science Fiction Collection: SCI FI MSS 00104., 1970-1994, (Cushing Memorial Library)
