Marshall Klimasewiski is a fiction writer who teaches a variety of graduate and undergraduate workshops, as well as creative-critical craft courses connected to some of his research interests, including story sequences and composite novels, intertextual work across genres, and contemporary historical fiction.
Marshall Klimasewiski is the author of two books, both published by W. W. Norton: The Cottages, a novel, and Tyrants, a collection of interconnected stories. His fiction has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Tin House, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review, and his stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and The Best of Tin House: Stories. He has received fellowships and individual grants from the Howard Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
More recently, his fiction involving researched, biographically-oriented historical fiction (concerning figures like Joseph Stalin’s housekeeper, or Arctic explorers and aviators Salomon August Andrée and Umberto Nobile) has evolved into a series of short pieces that merge aspects of fictional practice with a nonfiction writer’s fidelity to the historical record. These collages are composed almost entirely out of documents and sometimes include images as well. They attempt to find or construct neglected narratives in the archives of writers and artists, but to do so while limiting the biographer’s role to selection and composition, rather than the creation of an additional voice on the page. The new work has begun to appear in journals like Conjunctions (a piece on William Gaddis, and another on Edward Gorey, which can be found here) and the New England Review (on the long and complicated friendship between Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf).
Originally from Connecticut, Marshall has taught in the Writing Program at Washington University since 1999.