Wayne Karlin

Wayne Karlin (born June 13, 1945, in Los Angeles, California) is an American author, editor, and teacher. His books include Wandering Souls, Marble Mountain, War Movies: Journeys to Vietnam, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners, Rumors and Stones, Crossover, Lost Armies, The Extras, and Us.

Karlin attended White Plains High School, in New York and then served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1963 to 1967, when he was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant. His decorations include the Vietnam Service Medal, the Air Medal, a Presidential Unit Citation, and the Combat Air Crew Badge with three stars. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Humanities in 1970 from the American College in Jerusalem and his Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Goddard College in 1976.

He is a professor of Languages and Literature at the College of Southern Maryland, where he has taught since the mid-1980s. He was also American editor of the Curbstone Press Voices from Vietnam series of books. That series includes The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by Vietnamese and American Writers (1995), which he co-edited with Lê Minh Khuê and Truong Lu; The Stars, The Earth, The River: Short Fiction by Lê Minh Khuê (1997); Behind the Red Mist: Fiction by Hồ Anh Thái (1998); Against the Flood, a novel by Ma Văn Kháng (2000); Past Continuous, a novel by Nguyễn Khải (2001); The Cemetery of Chua Village and Other Stories by Đoàn Lê; (2005), Love After War: Contemporary Fiction from Viet Nam, co-edited with Hồ Anh Thái (2005), An Insignificant Family, by Dạ Ngân (2009), and Apocalypse Bell, by Hồ Anh Thái (2012), published by the Texas Tech University Press. Karlin also adapted and edited In Whose Eyes, the memoir of the Vietnamese filmmaker Trần Văn Thủy, published by the University of Massachusetts Press in October 2016.

Karlin was one of the script writers and served as a technical consultant and acted in the feature film Song of the Stork, a Vietnamese–Singaporean co-production, which won awards at several film festivals in Europe and Asia. He is at work on a film adaptation of Prisoners.

In 2006, Karlin was consulting producer and writer for Shared Weight, a series of hour-long radio programs involving interviews with writers, film makers and artists in Vietnam, and journeys of reconciliation. The programs were done by the Center for Emerging Media for National Public Radio. He wrote the script for "Wandering Souls", a follow up program, in 2009.

Karlin’s short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many literary magazines, including Antietam Review, Crab Orchard Review, Glimmer Train, Indiana Review, Manoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and War, Literature & the Arts. His articles and book reviews have appeared in The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times.

Karlin has received five State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paterson Prize in Fiction and the Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in the Arts Award. Prisoners was named an Outstanding Novel of 1998 in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook and The Wished-For Country was selected as an Outstanding Novel in the 2002 Yearbook. Love After War was named one of the best books of the year of 2005 by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Karlin lives in Saint Mary’s County, Maryland, and is married to Ohnmar Thein Karlin, a retired counselor for adolescent youth. Their son, Adam Karlin, is a travel writer, most of whose work is published through Lonely Planet.