William Holmes Buford is an American author and journalist born in 1954 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He has written several notable books including Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Buford served as fiction editor for The New Yorker and remains on staff there. He was editor of Granta for sixteen years, relaunching the publication in 1979. He is credited with coining the term "dirty realism."