Nolan received his PhD from the
University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz) and has gone on to teach Literature and Creative Writing at universities in
Florida,
San Francisco,
Barcelona,
Madrid, and
Beijing. Until recently, he was the Writer-in-Residence at New Orleans'
Tulane and
Loyola Universities, where he directed the Loyola Writing Institute for 12 years. He later went on to teach creative writing at the Arts Council of New Orleans. He has been the recipient of a
National Endowment of the Arts grant, a Javits Fellowship in the Humanities, and two
Fulbright Fellowships. His collection of short stories,
Perpetual Care, won the 2007 Jefferson Press Prize and the 2009 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Short Story Collection. Nolan was awarded the 2008
Faulkner–Wisdom Gold Medal in the novel category for the manuscript of his first novel
Higher Ground, and his most recent short story collection, You Don't Know Me, won the 2015 Independent Publishers Gold Medal in Southern Fiction. In 2017, he published a memoir titled
Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy, honored with the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Best Memoir. About Flight Risk, the novelist Alexander McCall Smith has written that "James Nolan's memoir is vivid, entertaining, and utterly memorable, one of the most enjoyable reads that has come my way for a very long time." Andrei Codrescu writes that Flight Risk "looks back unsparingly on a time few writers have faced with such clarity and compassion. There's suspense and beauty on every page." Nolan's most recent book is
Nasty Water: Collected New Orleans Poems, which contains fifty poems written over the past fifty years focused on his native city. ==Works==