Winner of the Academy Award (2004) from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Porter is the author of three short story collections: The Kentucky Stories, Lithuania, and Touch Wood (Turtle Point, 2002); two novels: Eelgrass and Resident Aliens; and two nonfiction books on William Shakespeare. He has won Pushcart Prizes, NEA/PEN Syndicated Fiction awards, and fellowships from the NEA.

"The Near Future is a jewel of a book, a very funny novel about getting - among other things - old, and in Florida, and with less than one's entire dignity in tact. Porter's comic imagination of the truly droll sort, and with it he homes very closely in upon the truth." - Richard Ford "In The Near Future, Joe Ashby Porter has created a little world of flowering sadness rooted in a terrain of early bird specials, Spanish Moss and trailer parks. A world of love among the ruined under the burning Florida sun. This is a wonderful book by an artist who conjures wonders from the ordinary." - Frederic Tuten "Porter's unforgettable lovers traverse an archipelago of phantasmagoric settings where present and future, life and death, love and aggression become as entangled as mangrove roots. Porter is a master of dialogue and the reality of the voices gives his characters such intensity and pathos that you wish for each of them...the impossible happy ending." - Emily Grocholz"