Michael Lowenthal

Michael Lowenthal's fourth novel, The Paternity Test (Terrace Books/University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), was an IndieNext selection and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His previous novels are The Same Embrace (Dutton, 1998), Avoidance (Graywolf Press, 2002), and Charity Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), which was a New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" and a Washington Post "Top Fiction of 2007" pick. His short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, the Southern Review, and the Kenyon Review, and have been widely anthologized, in such volumes as Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge (HarperCollins), Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader (Bloomsbury), and Best New American Voices 2005 (Harcourt). He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Boston Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Out, and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Wesleyan writers' conferences, the MacDowell Colony, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, and the Instituto Sacatar, Lowenthal has also been awarded Lynchburg College's Thornton Residency and the James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize. He has taught creative writing at Boston College and Hampshire College, and as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at Leipzig University in Germany. Since 2003 has been a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. Before publishing his own work, Lowenthal was an editor at University Press of New England, where he founded the Hardscrabble Books imprint, publishing such authors as Chris Bohjalian, W.D. Wetherell, and Ernest Hebert. He studied English and comparative religion at Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1990 as class valedictorian. A former board member of the literary human rights organization PEN New England, Lowenthal lives in Boston.