Charles D'Ambrosio (born 1958) is an American short story writer and essayist.
Contents |
D'Ambrosio grew up in Seattle, Washington, and now lives in Portland, Oregon. He attended Oberlin College and graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he has been a visiting faculty member.[1] D'Ambrosio is on the faculty of Portland State University's MFA Program in Creative Writing and is also an instructor at the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
He has published two collections of short stories, The Point (1995) and The Dead Fish Museum (2006). He has also published a collection of essays Orphans (2005). His writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Stranger (newspaper), The Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, and A Public Space.
Little Brown published D'Ambrosio's first short story collection, The Point in 1995. The collection was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Orphans, a collection of essays, was published in 2005 by Clear Cut Press. Ten years after his first collection, "The Point," Knopf published second book of fiction, The Dead Fish Museum. Six of the eight stories in the collection were originally published in The New Yorker. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In October 2006, D'Ambrosio was awarded the prestigious Whiting Writers' Award. Among other honors, he has received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship,[2] and is presently a USA Rasmuson Fellow. The Rasumuson Fellowship earned him a $50,000 grant from United States Artists, a relatively new organization that supports and promotes the work of American artists in a variety of disciplines.
The Dead Fish Museum won the 2007 Washington State Book Award for Fiction.
...in the last few years, writers in this book review have lamented the decline of slice-of-life realism, pronouncing it dead at least once. But pronouncing things dead is the job of critics, and the truth is that understated realism remains a robust tradition, as evidenced by the work of, among others, Charles D'Ambrosio, whose stories frequently appear in The New Yorker. Eleven years after the publication of his first book, "The Point," and one year after his book of essays, "Orphans," along comes "The Dead Fish Museum," which largely traverses the same Carveresque territory staked out in his debut: the charged relationships between fathers and sons, drifters and workers, in the outskirts of the American Northwest.[3]