Michael Lowenthal is the author of four novels: The Same Embrace (Dutton, 1998); Avoidance (Graywolf Press, 2002); Charity Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), which was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007″ pick; and The Paternity Test (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), an Indie Next selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, the Southern Review, Guernica, True Story, and the Kenyon Review, and have been widely anthologized, in such volumes as Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge, Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, and Best New American Voices 2005. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Out, and many other publications. His first story collection, Sex With Strangers, was published in March 2021.
The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Wesleyan writers’ conferences, the MacDowell Colony, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and the Instituto Sacatar, Lowenthal has also been awarded Lynchburg College’s Thornton Residency and the James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize. He has taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College, and as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University in Germany. Since 2003 has been a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University.
Before publishing his own work, Lowenthal was an editor at University Press of New England, where he founded the Hardscrabble Books imprint, publishing such authors as Chris Bohjalian, W.D. Wetherell, and Ernest Hebert. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in English and comparative religion.
A former board member of the literary human rights organization PEN New England, Lowenthal lives in Boston.
At MacDowell, he worked on his fourth novel.
