James Wilcox worked at Random House and Doubleday in New York after graduating from Yale.
Wilcox is the author of nine comic novels mostly set in, or featuring characters from, the fictional town of Tula Springs, Louisiana.
Polite Sex (1991) and Plain and Normal are set mainly in New York City, but they do have a few characters who come from Tula Springs.
He has been a judge for the PEN/Hemingway Award for the best first-published book of fiction by an American writer published in 1991; for the 1994 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award; for the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society novella contest in 1999; and for the Eudora Welty Prize for Fiction given by The Southern Review in 2005.
LSU recognized him as the 2008 Distinguished Research Master of Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences.