UIUC Creative Writing

John Rubins grew up in a Levitt house on Long Island, New York, in one of the first mass housing developments in the United States. He studied architecture and earth and planetary science as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis but turned to writing as a young adult and received his MFA from Emerson College in Boston. He has worked on the editorial staffs of the New Renaissance, New England Review, and Ploughshares, and he was also the editor and founder of the now defunct Tatlin's Tower, one of the first web magazines to publish literary quality fiction. John's own writing has appeared in Seattle Weekly, The Southeast Review, where he was a finalist for the World's Best Short Short Story Contest, New Genre, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Electric Velocipede, Seven Days, Ninth Letter, and in the web journals Failbetter and Surgery of Modern Warfare. He was awarded the Susannah McCorkle Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference and has also been a guest presenter at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where for several years he gave talks on writing and the web. He is currently at work on a novel about the birth of language.