ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R. Clifton Spargo is a Chicago-based novelist and cultural critic who writes the blog “The HI/LO,” on the interplay between high and low culture, for The Huffington Post.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the doctoral program in literature at Yale University, he is a past winner of Glimmer Train’s Award for New Writers as well as their Fiction Open Contest. His stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, FICTION, SOMA, and elsewhere, and they have been interpreted and performed by Chicago Public Radio’s Stories on Stage (2011) and the Watershed Theater in Des Moines (2012).

He has taught creative writing at Yale University, Marquette University, and as the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Fiction at the University of Iowa. He created and regularly teaches the testimonial writing workshop “The Stories We Tell” for the award-winning non-profit The Voices and Faces Project; and he is the inaugural Dixon Professor in Creative Writing at Wittenberg University for the fall 2014. His essays, interviews, and reviews on literature, culture, and rock music have appeared among other places in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Raritan, Commonweal, The Yale Review, The Chicago Tribune, Newcity, Bookslut, and The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan.

“Spargo’s voice is entirely his own and is capable of articulating certain ranges of experience only rarely now available to us. At once we are in contemporary America and also in a timeless space of personal loss…. His work seems to me marked for permanence.” —Harold Bloom

To invite Clifton for readings, festivals, or other speaking events, inquire at rcliftonspargo@gmail.com

For reviews, press, or other inquiries about Beautiful Fools, contact Josie Urwin at jurwin@overlookny.com