Chris Offutt

Last updated

Christopher John Offutt (born August 24, 1958) is an American writer. He is most widely known for his short stories and novels, but he has also published three memoirs and multiple nonfiction articles. In 2005, he had a story included in a comic book collection edited by Michael Chabon, and another in the anthology Noir. He has written episodes for the TV series True Blood and Weeds.

Contents

Early life and education

Chris Offutt was born in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of Andrew J. Offutt, an author, and his wife Jodie. His brother Jeff Offutt is a professor of software engineering. He has two sisters: Scotty Hyde, who lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Melissa Offutt, who lives in San Diego. They grew up in Haldeman, a small former mining community located in Rowan County in the Appalachian Mountain foothills of eastern Kentucky. [1] They all attended public schools. Offutt quit high school intending to join the army, but failed the physical.[ citation needed ] Offutt subsequently attended Morehead State University and graduated with a degree in theater and a minor in English. After college, he hitchhiked around the country, taking more than 50 jobs, all part-time, and began writing.[ citation needed ]

Offutt later attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Literary career

In 1992, Offutt published his first short story collection, Kentucky Straight. His second book was the 1993 memoir The Same River Twice. In 1997 he published his first novel, The Good Brother. In 1998 he published Two-Eleven All Around.

In 1999, he published his second collection of stories, Out of the Woods. His next book was a memoir, No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home (2002), about a six-month return to Rowan County where he had lived as a child.

Offutt's story, “Chuck’s Bucket,” was included in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2002), edited by Michael Chabon. [2] In 2005, Offutt made his comic book debut when he wrote "Another Man's Escape" for Michael Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist . A second comic is included in the anthology Noir, from Dark Horse Comics.[ citation needed ]

Offutt has been a visiting faculty member at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the University of Montana, the University of New Mexico, Grinnell College, Morehead State University, and Mercer University. He is teaching at the University of Mississippi as visiting faculty.

In addition to his fiction, Offutt writes non-fiction articles, which have been published in The New York Times , Men's Journal , and the Oxford American and aired on National Public Radio.[ citation needed ] His work is widely translated, and it is taught in high schools and colleges. His stories are included in many anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, and New Stories of the South (four works). They have twice been featured on "Selected Shorts" on NPR. He has also written screenplays for TV series.

Honors

His work has received awards from the Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He received a Whiting Award in Fiction and Nonfiction. In 1996 Offutt was named one of the twenty best young American fiction writers by Granta magazine. [3]

Works

Books

Stories and articles

Television

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Chabon</span> American author and Pulitzer Prize winner

Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Marcus</span> American author and professor

Ben Marcus is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.

Andrew Jefferson Offutt V was an American science fiction, fantasy, and erotic fiction author. He wrote as Andrew J. Offutt, A. J. Offutt, and Andy Offutt. His normal byline, andrew j. offutt, has all his name in lower-case letters. His erotica appeared under seventeen different pseudonyms, principally John Cleve, John Denis, Jeff Morehead, and Turk Winter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Saunders</span> American writer (born 1958)

George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, American Psyche, to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.

Stuart Dybek is an American writer of fiction and poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jess Row</span> American short story writer, novelist, and professor

Jess Row is an American short story writer, novelist, and professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Straight</span> American writer (born 1960)

Susan Straight is an American writer. She was a National Book Award finalist for the novel Highwire Moon in 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saïd Sayrafiezadeh</span> American dramatist

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is an American memoirist, playwright and fiction writer living in New York City. He won a 2010 Whiting Award for his memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free. He is the author of two story collections, American Estrangement (2021) and Brief Encounters With the Enemy, which was short-listed for the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction. He serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Doty</span> American poet and memoirist (born 1953)

Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.

Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, was published in August 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).

Melanie Rae Thon is an American fiction writer known for work that moves beyond and between genres, erasing the boundaries between them as it explores diversity, permeability, and interdependence from a multitude of human and more-than-human perspectives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Alarcón</span> Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer

Daniel Alarcón is a Peruvian-American novelist, journalist and radio producer. He is co-founder, host and executive producer of Radio Ambulante, an award-winning Spanish language podcast distributed by NPR. Currently, he is an assistant professor of broadcast journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and writes about Latin America for The New Yorker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Keene (writer)</span> American poet (born 1965)

John R. Keene Jr. is a writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry.

Daniel Orozco is an American writer of fiction known primarily for his short stories. His works have appeared in anthologies such as The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology and magazines such as Harper's and Zoetrope. He is a former Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer of Stanford University and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. He won a 2011 Whiting Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helon Habila</span> Nigerian novelist and poet (born 1967)

Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is an American novelist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffery Renard Allen</span> American poet

Jeffery Renard Allen is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits and Stellar Places, and four works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, the story collection Holding Pattern a second novel, Song of the Shank, and his most recent book, the short story collection “Fat Time and Other Stories”. He is also the co-author with Leon Ford of “An Unspeakble Hope: Brutality, Forgiveness, and Building A Better Future for My Son”.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Marra</span> American fiction writer (born 1984)

Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer. Marra has won numerous awards for his short stories, as well as his first novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which was a New York Times best seller.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mitchell S. Jackson</span> American writer

Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carmen Maria Machado</span> American writer

Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.

References

  1. Preston, Tim (2014-01-13). "Chris Offutt: From Morehead to Hollywood". The Independent . Retrieved 2015-04-19.
  2. "McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales: 9781400033393 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books". PenguinRandomhouse.com. Retrieved 2022-03-15.
  3. "Best of Young American Novelists" Archived May 15, 2010, at the Wayback Machine , Granta 54,
  4. "Moscow, Idaho". 20 June 1996.
  5. "My Father, The Pornographer A Memoir by Chris Offutt". Kirkus Reviews. November 19, 2015. Retrieved January 14, 2016.

Further reading