Lee Gutkind is an American writer, speaker, and literary innovator, founder of the literary magazineCreative Nonfiction, the first and the largest literary journal to publish narrative/creative nonfiction exclusively. Disparagingly spotlighted in Vanity Fair Magazine in 1997 as "the Godfather behind creative nonfiction", Gutkind has been its most active advocate and practitioner both as editor and writer. Gutkind has written or edited more than 30 books, covering a wide range of subjects from motorcyclesubculture to child and adolescent mental illness and organ transplantation. Currently he is Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes and Professor at the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.
Early life and career beginnings
Gutkind was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and educated at the University of Pittsburgh, from which he graduated in 1968. After high school and service in the United States Coast Guard, he worked his way through the University of Pittsburgh as a truck driver, traveling shoe salesman and public relations account executive, traveling throughout the country promoting the Helium Centennial for the U.S. Department of the Interior. After his first book was published, Bike Fever, which profiled the motorcycle subculture, he joined Pitt’s Department of English where he became the first tenured professor at the university without an advanced degree. Gutkind has termed his approach to writing about nonfiction subjects the "literature of reality."
Career
When Gutkind began pioneering creative nonfiction, few if any university creative writing programs offered courses or degrees, but he saw creative nonfiction as a way of connecting students with the real world through what he called "the literature of reality", most directly represented by the memoir. Gutkind helped found MFA programs in narrative and creative nonfiction at Pitt and subsequently at Goucher College in Maryland. Gutkind is founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine devoted to nonfiction narrative. He is also editor of Best Creative Nonfiction, an annual anthology of creative nonfiction. At Arizona State University, he founded the ThinkWritePublish program, supported by The National Science Foundation and the Templeton Foundation. Gutkind has widely lectured on his writing techniques to a wide range audiences and organizations, including the National Academy of Science, Earth Justice, the Institute for Learning, the Council on Healthcare Economics and Policy at Princeton University, as well as foreign audiences. Gutkind founded the creative nonfiction program and MFA degree at the University of Pittsburgh, the first in the world. He helped found the low residency MFA program in creative nonfiction at Goucher College, and was director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference at Goucher for 11 years. He was the director and founder of the 412 Creative Nonfiction Literary Festival for four years, a citywide literary event that provides professional development to students and city residents and fosters the strength of the local writing community. Gutkind also served as the Virginia G. Piper Distinguished Writer in Residence at Arizona State University in 2007-2008.
