Joseph Cassara is the author of the novel The House of Impossible Beauties, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2018 to critical acclaim. It won the Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, two International Latino Book Awards, the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Fiction Book, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.
It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, chosen by Graham Norton as one of his Top 5 Reads of 2018, and included in WH Smith’s Fresh Talent program. Hailed as one of the most anticipated novels of the year by dozens of newspapers and magazines, it was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal and Buzzfeed, and was listed as one of the best literary novels of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Library Journal, and the American Librarian Association’s Over The Rainbow Booklist.
He holds a B.A. in English language and literature from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has received fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Studios of Key West, and California Humanities. He has given talks at the University of Chicago, NYU, University of Nevada, George Mason University, and has appeared at the London Literature Festival, Key West Literary Seminars, Miami Book Fair, and the Provincetown Book Festival.
Currently based in California, he serves as the George & Judy Marcus Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Assistant Professor in the M.F.A. program at San Francisco State University.
While at MacDowell he worked on his second book, currently untitled, about queer life in post-Revolution Cuba and its diaspora.
