Lance Olsen

Lance Olsen was born in 1956 in River Edge, New Jersey, and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia. He is author of eleven novels, one hypermedial project, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and two textbooks about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His most recent

novels include Calendar of Regrets, Head in Flames, Anxious Pleasures: After Kafka, and Nietzsche’s Kisses. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Village Voice, BOMB, 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 was a

finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at many writing conferences, and elsewhere. He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah and serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America’s best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities. He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.

Profile photograph by Andi Olsen.