kenyon

R. Clifton Spargo is a Chicago-based fiction writer and critic. A past winner of Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open Contest and a recent finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize in Fiction, he has published stories in The Antioch Review, Fiction, The Kenyon Review, North Atlantic Review, and SOMA, among other journals, and his essays and reviews have been featured in Raritan, Commonweal, The Yale Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, and The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan.

One of three finalists for the inaugural Hiett Prize in the Humanities, Spargo is the author of two critical books published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, The Ethics of Mourning (2004) and Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death (2006). He is co-editor, with Robert M. Ehrenreich, of After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture (2010). He serves as the literary advisor to The Voices and Faces Project, an award-winning documentary project that fosters the collaboration of activists, artists, and writers.

Spargo has taught creative writing and held a visiting associate professorship at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in English and American Literature. Previously a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities at Yale, the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the John D. and Rose H. Jackson Fellow at the Beinecke Library at Yale, and in 2010 a Leon Milman Memorial Fellow at the Holocaust Museum, he currently teaches creative writing and American literature at Marquette University.