Thomas Israel Hopkins

Biography

My short fiction has been published in the Massachusetts Review, Fence, Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, One Story, and about two dozen other publications. I have also written for Bookforum, Tablet, and Poets & Writers, as well as a number of alumni magazines and other university publications.

I’ve taught writing to high school students at Sarah Lawrence College, graduate students at Columbia University’s creative writing program, working adults at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and undergraduates at New York University, Smith College, and Yale University.

Among other honors, I’ve been a finalist for the Calvino Prize, the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction, and Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest. I was runner-up in the 2012 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and I’ve held residencies at the Albee Foundation and the Ucross Foundation.

As a musician and actor, I’ve busked in the French Quarter, opened for Patti Smith and Sleepy LaBeef. I have performed in basements, coffeeshops, abandoned warehouses, and bars from Northampton to Oregon, San Francisco to Chapel Hill, and one legitimate theater in Moscow.

As a writer and editor, I’m interested in chapbooks and small presses, formal experimentation, and hoaxes and false documents. My limited-edition, self-published book the Year of Living Autobiographically was an Oulipean experiment in social media, self-publishing, and the gift economy.