A native of Delaware and graduate of the University of Delaware with a BA in English and Anthropology, Philip Gerard is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina. His novel Cape Fear Rising, a fictional account of the Wilmington (NC) white supremacist Coup of 1898, was reissued in a special 25th anniversary edition with a foreword by Randall Kenan and an author’s afterword that addresses both the process of writing the novel and the backlash that followed its original publication.

His essay collection, The Patron Saint of Dreams, was awarded the 2012 North
American Gold Medal for Essay and Creative Nonfiction by the Independent Publisher (“Ippy”). He has also written eleven documentary television scripts, scores of radio essays, several magazine series, and an award-winning radio drama.

He has appeared on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition, CNN, and C-SPAN, and was a regular commentator on the History Channel.

He serves on the Board of Directors of the North Carolina Civil War, Emancipation, & Reconstruction History Center and teaches in the Department of
Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington, where he founded the MFA Program. He lives in Wilmington, NC, with his wife, Jill, with whom he co-edits Chautauqua, the literary journal of Chautauqua Institution, NY.

In 2019, he received the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor.