Biomatter

born in 72, grew up on Elvis, even have some mem­o­ries of being four years old and my mother hold­ing me up above the crowd at one of his con­certs, how there was just a sea of pop­ping flash­bulbs, this shiny guy way up front. grew up all over Texas, mostly West Texas, mostly in a place too small to even have a post office. learned farm­ing and ranch­ing from both sides of my fam­ily, who told me not to do what they did, to use my head instead of my back. bit my tongue off in the third grade, had it sewn back on, spent a lot of time just watch­ing peo­ple. played Danny Zuko in a pro­duc­tion of Grease that fell apart in the sixth grade. had read every Louis L’Amour, Conan and Stephen King by the time I was a fresh­man in high school. played just lots and lots of bas­ket­ball, but then got kicked out of school enough that I finally got the hint, quit, thought pool was maybe my call­ing. it wasn’t. nei­ther were Ford trucks. finally snagged a diploma through alter­na­tive school and — sur­prise — got a free ride my first year of col­lege, thanks to my mother. the one who took me to Elvis. she knew, I think, that if I just got there, I’d get hooked on the learn­ing. she was right. I was a phi­los­o­phy major, took some writ­ing classes, then bounced up to grad school. never to teach, to be a pro­fes­sor, but to snag what­ever craft tricks I could, smug­gle them out to hor­ror and scifi and fan­tasy and west­erns, each of which I was in love with at the same time. my first pub­li­ca­tion was my first semes­ter doing my MA work, I think. a story called “Pale­o­ge­n­e­sis, circa 1970.” BLACK WARRIOR REVIEW. dis­cov­ered Thomas Pyn­chon and Philip K. Dick soon after that; have no clue how I ever pre­tended to have got­ten along with­out them. wound up finally at Florida State, snagged a PhD there, then lucked into get­ting my dis­ser­ta­tion pub­lished. back then it was called FOR THERE NEEDED NO HORSES (a Kafka-line). by the time the book got pub­lished, it would be THE FAST RED ROAD, A PLAINSONG. was work­ing in the ware­house at Sear’s at that time, mov­ing fridges all day. with my back, yes. which was soon to be trashed, strand­ing me in the land of deskjobs. to cel­e­brate FRR’s pub­li­ca­tion, my wife and I ate a plate of fried zuc­chini at a sit-down restau­rant. it tasted very good. my next novel was ALL THE BEAUTIFUL SINNERS. it’s not my sec­ond book, just my sec­ond pub­lished. I wrote five between FRR and ATBS, I think. one of them THE BIRD IS GONE: A MANIFESTO, came out right after ATBS. have writ­ten a few since then, too. can’t seem to stop.

Nov­els and col­lec­tions:
The Fast Red Road — A Plain­song [FAST]
All the Beau­ti­ful Sin­ners [ATBS]
The Bird is Gone: A Man­i­festo [BIRD]
Bleed Into Me: A Book of Sto­ries [BN2M]
Demon The­ory [DMON]
The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti
Led­feather
The Ones That Almost Got Away: Sto­ries (forthcoming)

Sto­ries:
all over the place (link’s to an older list, sorry; haven’t rigged a new one up in two or three years). am very close to hav­ing a story pub­lished in each jour­nal of the alpha­bet (ie, Alaska Quar­terly, Beloit, Cut­bank, etc).

Awards:
Texas Insti­tute of Let­ters Jesse Jones Award for Fic­tion (2005)
Final­ist, Inde­pen­dent Pub­lish­ers Award for Mul­ti­cul­tural Fic­tion (2004)
First Prize, Lit­eral Latte Short-short con­test (2002)
Writer’s League of Texas Fel­low­ship in Lit­er­a­ture (2002)
National Endow­ment for the Arts Fel­low­ship in Lit­er­a­ture: Fic­tion (2001)
Inde­pen­dent Pub­lish­ers Award for Mul­ti­cul­tural Fic­tion (2001)
Final­ist, Steven Turner Award for First Fic­tion, Texas Insti­tute of Let­ters (2001)

Dayjob:
Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish, Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado at Boulder

Nightjob:
writ­ing. and then writ­ing some more.

King:
Elvis

“My hat is off to Stephen Gra­ham Jones, because he is the kind of author that makes the frus­trated writer inside every book reviewer cringe with self-doubt.” -Pop­Mat­ters

“Jones has exploded the con­ven­tional rhythms of nov­el­is­tic nar­ra­tive.” -The Austin Chronicle

Posted: 01|22|06 at 8:41 pm. Filed under: Author.

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