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, 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 work 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. This archival work involves biographical collages that are almost entirely composed of documents—an attempt to limit the biographer’s role to selection and composition rather than the creation of a voice on the page. The new work has begun to appear in journals like Conjunctions (a piece on William Gaddis) 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.
