Lee Gutkind

Early life

Gutkind was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and educated at the University of Pittsburgh. After high school and service in the United States Coast Guard, he worked his way through the University of Pittsburgh as a truck driver, traveling shoe salesman and public relations account executive, traveling throughout the country promoting the Helium Centennial for the U.S. Department of the Interior. After his first book was published, Bike Fever, which profiled the motorcycle subculture, he joined Pitt’s Department of English where he became the first tenured professor at the university without an advanced degree.

His immersion experiences into the motorcycle subculture, the organ transplant milieu, baseball umpires, and in other un-mined worlds about which he has written, along with the literary techniques he has developed, has helped to create a new paradigm for writing about the world — the “literature of reality” that is creative nonfiction.

Gutkind is founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine devoted to nonfiction narrative. He is also editor of Best Creative Nonfiction, an annual anthology of creative nonfiction. Gutkind is author of You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction, From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything In Between. Gutkind has written 15 books, and edited 18 collections and volumes. In celebration of his impact on the genre, In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, was published in 2004 by W.W. Norton. Book List called In Fact “an electrifying anthology . . . an exciting and defining creative nonfiction primer.”

Vanity Fair Magazine proclaimed Gutkind “the Godfather” behind the creative nonfiction movement, and Harper’s Magazine noted that he is “the leading figure behind the creative nonfiction movement.”

Career

When Gutkind began pioneering creative nonfiction, few if any university creative writing programs offered courses or degrees, but he saw creative nonfiction as a way of connecting students with the real world through what he called “the literature of reality.” Today, poets, novelists, journalists, playwrights recognize the art and challenge of creative nonfiction, capturing their lives and the lives of others through memoir, biography and other forms of documentary drama. Gutkind helped found MFA programs in narrative and creative nonfiction at Pitt and subsequently at Goucher College in Maryland.

With Creative Nonfiction magazine, Gutkind has introduced the literature of reality to a new set of practitioners—scientists, engineers, policy scholars, mathematicians, roboticists, philosophers—outstanding men and women– innovators and scholars. At Arizona State University, he founded the ThinkWritePublish program, supported by The National Science Foundation (Science in Society) and the Templeton Foundation (True Stories About Science and Religion).

Gutkind has presented his “True Stories That Matter” techniques ideas to record-breaking audiences at the National Press Club in Washington, to scientists and engineers at the National Academy of Science, to advocates at Earth Justice, to teachers and administrators at the Institute for Learning, to scholars at the International Design Frontiers national conference, to the Council on Healthcare Economics and Policy at Princeton University–and to librarians, museums and creative writing programs—from China, to Australia to the Middle East.

Gutkind founded the creative nonfiction program and MFA degree at the University of Pittsburgh, the first in the world. He helped found the low residency MFA program in creative nonfiction at Goucher College, and was director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference at Goucher for 11 years. He was the director and founder of the 412 Creative Nonfiction Literary Festival for four years, a citywide literary event that provides professional development to students and city residents and fosters the strength of the local writing community. Gutkind also served as the Virginia G. Piper Distinguished Writer in Residence at Arizona State University in 2007-2008.

Awards

Lee Gutkind's list of honorary achievements include: The Steve Allan Individual Award, by United Mental Health, Inc; Chancellor's Award for Public Service; Meritorious Service Award by American Council on Transplantation; Howard Blakeslee Award by the American Heart Association for "outstanding journalism; Golden Eagle Award by CINE, for the film A Place Just Right; Recipient of National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. In 2004, Gutkind was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Chatham College.

Books

Lee Gutkind’s books have been praised for being simultaneously personal and universally informative. His award-winning Many Sleepless Nights, an inside chronicle of the world of organ transplantation, has been reprinted in Italian, Korean and Japanese editions. An Unspoken Art, a profile of veterinary medicine, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His book about major league umpires, The Best Seat In Baseball, But You Have to Stand!, was called by USA Today "unprecedented, revealing, startling and poignant."

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction, From Memoir to Literary Journalism to Everything in Between, is “reminiscent of Stephen King’s fiction handbook On Writing,” according to Kirkus Review — "An accessible, indispensable nonfiction guidebook from an authority who knows his subject from cover to cover.”

Gutkind frequently crosses genres as a writer, editor and reporter. He is a published novelist, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and served as a consulting editor at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. teaching narrative techniques to reporters, producers and editors on the Science Desk. Also as the former director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, Lee Gutkind pioneered the teaching of creative nonfiction, conducting workshops and presenting readings throughout the United States, Europe, Australia and Israel.