I had an arsenal of interest assessments, intelligence and skill tests, and simulated workstations. I was a specialized counselor who performed lengthy evaluations of other counselors’ clients. You briefly worked as a counselor before pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Tumbledown is about a group of characters in a treatment facility. He and his family live in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado.

Boswell teaches creative writing at the University of Houston, where he and his wife share the Cullen Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. He is married to the writer, Antonya Nelson, and they have two children, Jade and Noah. Henry Prize Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthology, Esquire, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, The O. He has received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, the PEN West Award for Fiction, the John Gassner Prize for Playwriting, and the Evil Companions Award. His collection of stories, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award in fiction. Graywolf released Tumbledown, Boswell’s latest novel, last month. “Who come to class full of enthusiasm for literature? Who daily remind me why I wanted to be a writer in the first place? I think so.” “Is it good for me to spend time with young women and men who have put aside big chunks of their lives to see if they can become writers?” Boswell says.

Richard Ford calls Boswell “an extremely appealing writer: uncommonly intuitive, a sparkling observer, graceful yet surprising sentence-to-sentence and always in pursuit of important complexity in human behavior.” (It’s worth noting that Boswell, nearly a decade younger than Ford, has published just as many novels and story collections.)īoswell’s collection of essays, The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction, has become essential reading for many of today’s emerging authors. He has published more books than many full-time writers, including seven novels- Century’s Son, Mystery Ride, and Crooked Hearts among them-three story collections, a play, a pseudonymous cyberpunk novel, and two books of nonfiction. The career of Robert Boswell, who teaches in two creative writing programs and at a number of summer workshops and conferences, is a nice counterpoint to that notion. programs assume, and are often told, that teaching means time away from writing-that after responding to their students’ work, professors rarely have energy left for their own creative pursuits.

Century's Son by Robert Boswell