Thaddeus Rutkowski

Fiction Writer

BIO

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of the novels Haywire (Starcherone/Dzanc), Tetched (Behler Publications) and Roughhouse (Kaya Press). Haywire reached No. 1 on Small Press Distribution's best-seller list. Both Tetched and Roughhouse were finalists for the Members' Choice of the Asian American Literary Awards. Tetched was chosen as one of the best books reviewed in 2006 by Chronogram magazine. Rutkowski's stories and poems have been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize. He has been the fiction editor of the literary journal Many Mountains Moving since 2007.

His work is anthologized in Up Is Up, but So Is Down: The New York Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images and other collections. His stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, American Letters and Commentary, Crowd, CutBank, Faultline, Fiction, Fiction International, Global City Review, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Laurel Review, Pleiades, Potomac Review and other magazines.

He teaches literature at City University of New York and fiction writing at the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA, and has taught at Pace University, the Hudson Valley Writers Center and the Asian American Writers Workshop. He received grants to visit the University of Pennsylvania, San Jose State University, Rowan University, St. Lawrence University and Utica College, and he appeared in the Neal Cross Lecture Series at the University of Northern Colorado. He has been a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell and other colonies. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Daily News and other papers. He has worked full-time since 1985 as a copy editor for weekly trade magazines.

He is a two-time winner of the Poetry Versus Comedy slam at the Bowery Poetry Club and a one-time winner of the Syracuse poetry slam and the Nuyorican Poets Café Friday slam. He was selected to read in the former home of East German President Erich Honecker in Berlin. He has been a featured reader in Paris, Hong Kong, Budapest and London, as well as in a number of U.S. cities.

He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.