Artist

Stuart Dybeck was born and raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. He now lives in Michigan and has taught at Western Michigan University since 1974. As an educator he participates in the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's Writers in Schools program, and for nearly ten years he has traveled to the Czech Republic to lead creative writing workshops teaching literature, film and drama. His fiction, poetry and nonfiction has been seen in The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times. Dybeck has received the 1995 PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize "for distinctive achievement in the short story;" an Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994; a Guggenheim Fellowship and two fellowships from the NEA. His books of poetry and short stories include Brass Knuckles (1979), Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (nominated for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, 1980) and The Coast of Chicago (1990); which included the short story Hot Ice (first prize O. Henry Prize) and Blight (Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award). His most recent book, I Sailed with Magellan (2003), portrays the Chicago escapades of Perry Katzek in eleven stories. A collection of poems titled Streets in Their Own Ink will be published this year.