David Schuman is a fiction writer and essayist. He lives in St. Louis, where he teaches and directs the writing program at Washington University. His stories have appeared in Fence, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, The Missouri Review, and many other publications. His essays have been published in The Colorado Review, Catapult, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. His fiction has been anthologized, most recently in Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilized Times edited by The Dark Mountain Project, and has also been selected as a notable story in the Best American Short Stories. He has received a Pushcart Prize, a George and Anne Borchardt Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers Conference, and a Riverfront Times Mastermind Award. Best Men, a prose chapbook, is forthcoming from Tammy Press.
Schuman spent the first week of his time at MacDowell drafting and editing short stories. Other stories from this current series have appeared in Fence and The Rupture and are forthcoming in On The Seawall and in a prose chapbook entitled Best Men, coming out with Tammy Press in 2021. For the remainder of his residency, Schuman worked on a novel, tentatively titled Aunt K, about, among other things, socialist New Jersey chicken ranches of the early and mid twentieth century, finally gaining a foothold on a project that he spent years researching but could never quite get off the ground. With seven new chapters drafted here in Peterborough, he's feeling optimistic and grateful for this gift of time and space.
Portrait by Erin Lewis
