David Jauss

When people ask me what my fiction and poetry is about, I'm never sure how to answer. It's easier to say what they aren't about: my own life. As I say in my essay "Autobiographobia: Writing and the Secret Life," in my stories and poems I have tried to write my way into many characters whose lives I know nothing, or next to nothing, about. On paper, I have been--or at least tried to be--a nun, a serial killer, a bag lady, a nine-year-old boy, a 99-year-old man, a woman afflicted with hysterical blindness, a teenager who witnesses his father's nervous breakdown, a man with an artificial hand, a divorcee, a minor league baseball player from the Dominican Republic, a Hmong refugee, a 16th-century Spanish priest, a 19th-century Russian dwarf, the biblical Lazarus, and several actual writers (including Gustave Flaubert, Anton Chekhov, and Franz Kafka) and numerous actual jazz musicians (including Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra). If there's a common denominator in all of the people I've written about, I don't know what it is. All I know is that I have been drawn to them and their lives and that they have created me as much as I have created them.

It's a good deal easier to answer people who ask what I write about in my essays, seven of which are collected in the book Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing. In my essays I write mostly about the craft of writing fiction and poetry--more specifically, about the creative process, point of view, present-tense narration, epiphanies, the music of syntax, experiments with traditional verse forms, and ways to structure short story collections. I have also written essays about various writers and their work. The subjects of these essays include Flannery O'Connor, William Carlos Williams, James Wright, and Lynda Hull. I've also written about jazz poetry and trends in contemporary fiction.

This website contains links to excerpts from and information about my stories, poems, essays, and anthologies. Please click on whichever links might interest you. And if you have any comments you'd like to make, please feel free to contact me at davidjauss@sbcglobal.net.

I was born in Minnesota in 1951 and educated at Southwest Minnesota State College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa. I am the author of two collections of short stories, Black Maps and Crimes of Passion; two books of poems, You Are Not Here and Improvising Rivers; and a collection of essays on the craft of fiction, Alone With All That Could Happen. I have also edited three anthologies, Words Overflown by Stars, an anthology of essays on the craft of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from past and present faculty of Vermont College of Fine Arts (forthcoming in January 2009), The Best of Crazyhorse: Thirty Years of Poetry and Fiction and, with Philip Dacey, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms.

My fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including Arts & Letters, The California Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, New England Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and The Writer's Chronicle. My work has also been translated into Indonesian, Farsi, and Braille and read over Voice of America radio.

My fiction has appeared in a dozen anthologies, including Best American Short Stories; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses; and The Pushcart Book of Stories: Best Stories from the First 25 Years of the Pushcart Prize.

My poetry has appeared in 30 anthologies, including Strongly Spent: 50 Years of Shenandoah Poetry and The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine.

From 1981-1991 I served as fiction editor of Crazyhorse, and I am currently on the Editorial Board of Hunger Mountain: The Vermont College Journal of Arts & Letters.

In addition to the O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Best American Short Stories selection mentioned above, my awards and honors include the AWP Award for Short Fiction, the Fleur-de-Lis Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, a fellowship from the Minnesota State Arts Board, and three fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council.

I teach creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and in the MFA in Writing Program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I also serve as Faculty Chair and have twice received the Louise Crowley & Roger Weingarten Award for Teaching Excellence. I live in Little Rock with my wife Judy and our dogs Toby, Phoebe, and Pip. We are proud parents of two grown children, Alison and Steve, both of whom live nearby, Alison with her own trio of pooches and Steve with his wife Kewen and our darling grandson Galen.

PERSONAL CONTACT

Please email me at davidjauss@sbcglobal.net.


PROFESSIONAL CONTACT

For a reading, lecture, workshop, interview, or other professional event, please email me at davidjauss@sbcglobal.net or write me at Dept. of English, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 2801 S. University Avenue, Little Rock, AR 72204.