JOHN STRULOEFF is the author of the poetry collection, The
Man I Was Supposed to Be (Loom Press, 2008), which was a finalist for six
national poetry book competitions, including the Colorado Prize for Poetry and
the A. Paulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (BOA Editions).
Set in the mountainous rainforests of his native Pacific Northwest, these poems
capture with startling clarity a people and a terrain that is both dark and
beautiful.
His fiction and poetry has been published in more than forty
magazines and literary journals, such as The Atlantic Monthly, The Literary
Review, The Southern Review, PN Review (UK), Vagabond (Bulgaria), Prairie
Schooner, Poet Lore, and War, Literature & the Arts, and in the anthologies
Open Spaces: Voices from the Pacific Northwest (University of Washington
Press), Tight Lines: Ten Years of the Yale Anglers’ Journal (Yale University
Press), and Aftermath: Stories of Secrets and Consequences (MSR Publishing,
December 2012), among others.
His honors include a Stegner Fellowship to Stanford
University (2005-07), an NEA Literature Fellowship (2009), a Sozopol Fiction
Fellowship (Bulgaria, Elizabeth Kostova Foundation), a Tennessee Williams
Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and a variety of travel and
research grants to Russia, the UK, Switzerland, and elsewhere.
He holds both the MA and PhD in English/Creative Writing
from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, as well as the BA in English from
Oregon State University, where he minored in physics and writing. His doctoral dissertation, entitled Spirit
Wrestlers, was a novel based on his grandfather’s family’s escape from Russia to
Canada, along with thousands of other doukhobortsi, at the beginning of the twentieth century.
He lives in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains in Thousand
Oaks, CA with his wife, New York Times bestselling young adult novelist,
Cynthia Hand (author of the Unearthly series from HarperTeen), and their two
children.
Currently he directs and teaches in the Creative Writing
program at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA.
