Christopher Castellani

Family and education

Christopher Castellani, the son of Italian immigrants, was raised in Wilmington and graduated from Salesianum School in 1990. He holds a B.A. in English Literature from Swarthmore College (1994), M.A. in English Literature from Tufts University (1996), and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University (1999).

Novels and other publications

A Kiss from Maddalena (Algonquin, 2003) won the 2004 Massachusetts Book Award. The Saint of Lost Things (Algonquin, 2005) was long-listed for the 2005 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Castellani's third novel, All This Talk of Love (Algonquin), was published in February 2013. His fourth book, an installment in the writing craft series from Graywolf Press, is The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, published in 2016. Castellani's novels have been translated and published outside the United States in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Australia, Thailand, and Taiwan. His short fiction and essays have been featured in several anthologies.

Academic and professional career

Castellani has taught English Literature at Tufts University (1997-2000) and Creative Writing as a visiting professor at Swarthmore College (2007). In 2004 and 2005, Castellani was a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College, and has served on the Bread Loaf faculty as well as the faculty of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA (2006).

He resides in Boston, Massachusetts where he is the Artistic Director of the creative writing non-profit GrubStreet, and serves on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is represented by the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary and Entertainment Agency.

Awards