I grew up in Harrison, NY, about ten miles north of the Bronx, and attended Nazareth College, Saint Bonaventure U, and NYU. I've been an English professor for many years, but in my forties I decided to stop writing about writers and start being a writer myself.
I've since published short stories in Glimmer Train, Colorado Review, Specs, Trachodon, Saranac Review, South Dakota Review, and GSU Review (now New South), and I've completed a novel, THE RUINS, about a young man from the Bronx visiting his family in Italy and coming to terms with his sister's death. I have also written a novel-in-stories, WHITE PLAINS, about a down-and-out professor who runs his life into the ground before finding redemption as a gardener. I am represented by Victoria Skurnick of the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.
Awards: Colorado Council on the Arts Fiction Award, Pushcart nomination, New Letters Fiction Contest finalist. Writer-in-residence @ Jentel Arts Foundation and Brush Creek Arts Foundation. THE RUINS: 2011 New Rivers MVP Fiction finalist, 2012 New American Press Fiction Award finalist, 2012 Engine Books Fiction Contest finalist.
I live with my wife Cynthia Kolanowski in Colorado, and am a professor of English at Regis University in Denver. My daughter Caitlin is a sophomore at Regis, and my son Stephen lives and works nearby. My favorite thing to do is to cook my wife and kids a big Sunday breakfast, followed by a hike in the mountains with Cynthia and our dog, Rosie Kangaroo.
I write because I'm driven to write. I've always wanted to be a writer. Now that I am one, I don't want to stop. Ever.
I teach Early American Lit, so I'm very fond of Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson, etc., as well as such 20th-century writers as Hemingway, Jean Toomer, Zora, and especially Faulkner. But when I read for pleasure, I almost always read contemporary fiction--Cormac McCarthy, Ron Carlson, Junot Diaz . . . there are too many to mention. (There's a high pile of books on my nightstand.) My favorite book of the last decade was Nicole Krauss's A History of Love, and my favorite books of all time are Melville's Moby-Dick and Pierre, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, and Toni Morrison's Beloved and Song of Solomon.
No one has written on David Hicks's wall.
No one has written on David Hicks's wall.