Ron Rozelle

Ron Rozelle is an American novelist, memoirist, journalist, and longtime Texas creative writing teacher, best known for the Writer's Digest craft title Write Great Fiction: Description and Setting (2005), part of the widely used Write Great Fiction series. He was raised in Oakwood, Texas, where his father Lester served as school superintendent, earned his B.A. from Sam Houston State University, and taught high school English for more than twenty years, including founding the creative writing program at St. Thomas High School in Houston and many years at Brazoswood High School in Lake Jackson. Sam Houston State named him a Distinguished Educator of the Year in 2017.

Write Great Fiction: Description and Setting walks novelists through the working mechanics of place and detail in fiction: how to establish a realistic sense of time and place, how to use description as a story engine rather than as decoration, how setting and description interact with plot and character development, how genre expectations shape the proportion of description (historical fiction and SF readers expect more setting; mainstream and thriller readers expect less), and the working show-versus-tell decision at the sentence level. Each chapter ends with practical exercises for use on a manuscript in progress.

His fiction includes The Windows of Heaven: A Novel of Galveston's Great Storm of 1900 (Texas Review Press, 2022), winner of the Texas Review Fiction Prize, A Place Apart (2001), Touching Winter (2005), and Leaving the Country of Sin (2021), winner of the 2022 Summerlee Book Prize for Creative Writing from the Lamar University Center for History and Culture. His memoir Into That Good Night (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) about his father's life as an East Texas school superintendent and his decline into Alzheimer's disease, was a finalist for the PEN American West Creative Nonfiction Prize and the Texas Institute of Letters Carr P. Collins Nonfiction Award.

He writes a weekly column for The Brazosport Facts on subjects ranging from loss and family to wizards, John Wayne, and his cats, and is the recipient of Image magazine's Artistic Merit Award. He lives in Lake Jackson, Texas, with his wife Karen and their daughters.