Richard John McCann (December 12, 1949 – January 24, 2021) was an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he was a longtime professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. As a teenager, he wrote to Bette Davis, whose work he greatly admired; they shared a correspondence which he recounted in a 2016 article in the Washington Post. The Pen/Faulkner Foundation announced his death on January 25, 2021, at the age of 71.