Eli Hastings

I live in Seattle with my brilliant, dancing doctor wife, Lili, and my nutcase toddler, Pax. I’m a team leader at PONGO TEEN WRITING; I work in other social services and the arts as well and am in the midst of a clinical internship counseling youth toward my MA in Marriage and Family Therapy. I earned my MFA and taught Creative Nonfiction and English courses at the UNC at Wilmington. My first book, FALLING ROOM, a memoir/essay collection, which won Best Nonfiction Thesis at UNCW in 2004 was published by UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS in their American Lives Series in 2006. A memoir/elegy, Clearly Now, the Rain: A Memoir of Love and Other Trips, is forthcoming from ECW PRESS in 2013. My fiction and nonfiction has appeared in: Rivendell, Third Coast, Cimarron Review, Pinyon, Whetstone, Alligator Juniper, Pedestal Magazine, the Seattle Review, Wandering Army, The Tulane Review, Blood Lotus, R.kv.r.y, Flashquake, 580 Split, YES! Magazine, and 10,000 TONS OF BLACK INK, & Lightship Anthology 2. I’ve been anthologized in Men Speak Out (Routledge Press, UK, 2007), American Lives: A Reader (University of Nebraska Press, edited by Tobias Wolff, 2010), Show & Tell: Writers on Writing (University of North Carolina Wilmington in 2009) and will appear in 10,000 Tons of Black Ink “Best Of” Volume II. I’ve twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, once for the essay I placed with Third Coast and most recently for my short story “Ghost Train” at 10,000 TONS OF BLACK INK. The essay at Alligator Juniper won their nonfiction contest. I’ve got several honorable mentions and runner up accolades, but you know about horseshoes and hand grenades. I’m a nonfiction editor at the online literary journal Cedars (WWW.CEDARSMAG.COM).