Steve Woodward

Steve Woodward is a writer, editor, and drummer. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. His writing has been recognized with a Minnesota State Arts Board grant and with Hopwood Awards in both fiction and nonfiction. He is currently working on his debut novel and is represented by Akin Akinwumi at Willenfield Literary. As a former senior editor at Graywolf Press, where he worked for over a decade, he edited books of literary fiction and nonfiction by authors including Anna Burns, Jamel Brinkley, Mark Doten, Percival Everett, Jakob Guanzon, Daisy Johnson, Esmé Weijun Wang, Nana Nkweti, Benjamin Percy, Susan Steinberg, and others. Authors he has worked with have won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Booker International Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize, and have been on the New York Times best seller list. He has spoken about editing and publishing at a number of conferences and venues, including AWP, the Loft Literary Center, Story Studio Chicago, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and Grub Street’s The Muse and the Marketplace, among other venues. Steve helped launch the editing semester in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, in which students work directly with editors on their thesis manuscripts. He was co-founder of the now-defunct Menagerie, an online magazine that focused on hybrid forms. He currently teaches literary publishing at Macalester College and the College of St. Benedict / St. John’s University and at the Loft Literary Center. He lives near a bend of the upper Mississippi River.