Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and is a graduate of Cornell University and The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Tricks of Light (Great Weather for Media), Border Crossings (Sensitive Skin), Guess and Check (Gival), Violent Outbursts (Spuyten Duyvil), Haywire (Starcherone, Blue Streak), Tetched (Behler), and Roughhouse (Kaya). Guess and Check won a Bronze Award for multicultural fiction from Electronic Literature. Haywire won the Members’ Choice Award, given by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Haywire reached No. 1 on Small Press Distribution’s fiction best-seller list. Tetchedwas chosen as one of the best books reviewed in 2006 by Chronogram magazine.
He received a 2012 fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His stories have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize.
His work is anthologized in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth), Up Is Up, but So Is Down (NYU), Screaming Monkeys (Coffeehouse) and other collections. His stories have appeared in Asia Literary Review, Copper Nickel, CutBank, Faultline, Fiction, Fiction International, Hawai'i Pacific Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The International Herald Tribune, The Laurel Review, Little Patuxent Review, The New York Times, Phoebe, Pleiades, Potomac Review, and many other publications.
He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute, Medgar Evers College and the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA, and has taught at Pace University, the Hudson Valley Writers Center and the Asian American Writers Workshop. He has visited the Community College of Philadelphia, the Gunston School, Rowan University, Rutgers University Camden, St. Lawrence University, San Jose State University, Tennessee Tech University, the University of Pennsylvania, Utica College and the University of Northern Colorado.
He is a one-time winner of the Nuyorican Poets Café Friday slam, the Poetry Versus Comedy slam at the Bowery Poetry Club, and the Syracuse poetry slam. He was selected to read in the former home of East German President Erich Honecker in Berlin. He has been a featured reader in Budapest, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Paris and Singapore, as well as in a number of U.S. cities.
He lives with his wife and his daughter in Manhattan.
