Peter Rock (born 1967) is an American novelist born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Reed College.
He attended Deep Springs College and received a BA in English from Yale University. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford Writing Program from 1995-1997. The manuscript for his novel This Is the Place won the Henfield Award in 1996. Before joining Reed in 2001, he taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania and at San Francisco State University. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
In 2010, Rock's novel My Abandonment received an Alex Award by the American Library Association.[1]
His short stories have appeared in Tin House, Zoetrope, Polite, One Story, and other literary magazines. These stories comprise his 2006 release, The Unsettling, a compilation of Rock’s stories.
Rock’s fiction focuses on characters on the fringe of society—outsiders, wanderers—and allows his readers to see into the minds of these otherwise invisible characters.