Matthew Salesses
Matthew Salesses is a Korean American fiction writer and essayist and Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA program at Virginia Tech.
Life
Salesses was born in South Korea and adopted by white American parents at age 2. He grew up in Storrs, Conn. and attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he studied English and creative writing. After college he taught English abroad, first in Prague and then in South Korea. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. Salesses is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Virginia Tech.Work
Salesses is the author of the novel The Hundred-Year Flood. He is also the author of Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear: A Novel ; Craft in the Real World, an examination of American writing workshops and the incorporation of Asian storytelling traditions and methodology to broaden them; I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying ; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity ; and The Last Repatriate.In 2015 BuzzFeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays have been published in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, ''The [New York Times] Motherlode, Glimmer Train, and VICE.com. He has received awards and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Mid-American Review.
For years, he wrote about fiction craft and pedagogy for the Pleiades'' blog, where he was the Website Editor. He has taught at Tin House and Kundiman.