R. Clifton Spargo

R. CLIFTON SPARGO, a Chicago-based fiction writer and cultural critic, is the author of Beautiful Fools, The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the Provost’s Postgraduate Visiting Writer in Fiction in the Department of English at the University of Iowa for 2013-14. A past winner of Glimmer Train’s Award for New Writers as well as their Fiction Open Contest, he has published stories in The Antioch Review, FICTION, Glimmer Train, SOMA, and The Kenyon Review, among other places.  His essays and reviews on literature, culture, and rock music have been featured in Raritan, Commonweal, The Yale Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, Newcity, and the fashion magazine Glo. And he writes a blog called “The HI/LO,” on the interplay between high and low culture, for The Huffington Post. He has taught creative writing at Yale University, Marquette University, and the University of Iowa. He has also been a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a John D. and Rose H. Jackson Fellow at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and an Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.