Lance Olsen
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Lance Olsen was born in 1956 and received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1980), and an M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.
[edit] Biography
For ten years he taught as associate and then full professor at the University of Idaho; for two he directed the University of Idaho's M.F.A. program. He has also taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, the University of Kentucky, on summer and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at FC2; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.
He is author of eight novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, Time Out, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and Best American Non-Required Reading. Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist (Permeable Press, 1994) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and his work has been translated into Italian, Polish, and Finnish.
The hypertext version of his novel, 10:01, created in collaboration with multimedia artist Tim Guthrie, was published by the Iowa Review Web in 2005.
His latest novel is Nietzsche's Kisses, which the American Book Review called "a brilliant achievement, a seamless, precise, marvelously affecting novel that must be read by everyone who appreciates the best of today's fiction."
Olsen lives with his wife, assemblage-artist Andi Olsen, in the mountains of central Idaho.
