I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and graduated from Lawrence University (1974) and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1977). In 1977, I moved to New York and for two years worked at the publishing house of Charles Scribner’s Sons. (My first job at Scribner’s was to re-type pages of a recently unearthed Hemingway manuscript that later became, after much editing and several editors, THE GARDEN OF EDEN.) After a year or so of doing odd jobs–as (to name only two) a part-time secretary to an avant-garde New York composer named Otto Luening and a “casual enumerator” for the U.S. Census Bureau (I had my own red, white, and blue plastic briefcase)–I took a job at The New Yorker as a fact checker. I was a fact checker from 1981 until 1986, and I wrote The New Yorker’s front-of-the-magazine Night Life column (and the occasional Briefly Noted book review) from 1986 until 1989. Between 1989 and 1991, I wrote a sports column for a now defunct New York magazine called Wigwag. I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1991, and for a couple of years wrote for Isthmus, Madison’s alternative newspaper, as well as other publications. My first book of fiction, THE GREEN SUIT, was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2000, when I was forty-nine. (The University of Wisconsin Press published a new edition of the book in the fall of 2011.) My second book, a novel entitled JUDGE (Algonquin), came out in 2003. (An e book edition was recently brought out by Dzanc.) In 2004, I was a visiting writer at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where I taught a course in fiction writing. My third book, a novel called THE TYPEWRITER SATYR, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009. My stories have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, The Missouri Review, Epoch, and NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH: THE YEAR’S BEST. My essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, the Cambridge Book Review, and elsewhere. I have two children, Nora, who is seven and a second-grader in Madison, and George, who is twenty-six and a graduate student at the University of California-Irvine.

Dwight Allen