Padgett Powell is an American novelist. He is the author of six novels and two story collections. He has received a 1986 Whiting Writers' Award and the 1987 Rome Fellowship in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Powell has been a writing professor at the University of Florida since 1984.

"If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?"

– Padgett Powell