Tom Spanbauer grew up on a farm twelve miles outside Pocatello, Idaho. He attended St. Joseph’s Catholic School and Highland High School. In 1969, he received his BA in English literature from Idaho State University. Tom served two years in the Peace Corps in Kenya, East Africa. He returned to Idaho until 1978, when he decided he needed to get out of that state. He moved to New Hampshire, then Vermont, then Key West, Florida. Tom studied at Columbia University while waiting tables at Café Un Deux Trois and Odeon and being a super of five buildings on East Fifth Street. In 1988, he received his MFA in fiction from Columbia. In 1991, Tom settled in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches Dangerous Writing in the basement of his house. Forty (more or less—he’s lost count) of his students have published novels and/or memoirs. His novels include Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, In the City of Shy Hunters, and Now is the Hour.
Biography
Titles
I Loved You More
- fiction
Intelligence, wit, generosity, love, wisdom, insight, humility, guts, heart-crushing truth and spirit-lifting grace—it’s all there in I Loved You More. This is Tom Spanbauer’s wrenching a
- Cheryl Strayed
- Author of Wild
Tom Spanbauer’s first novel in seven years is a rich and expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak covering 25 years. At the heart of the book is a love triangle: two men, one woman, all of them writers. The first chapters are set in the mid-80s in New York City. At Columbia, Ben forms a bond...Forward
Faraway Places
- Introduction by A.M. Homes
- fiction
A taut, brutal narrative … that comes to hypnotize, shimmering like the brilliant sun on the alfalfa fields.
- The New York Times Book Review
It is early 1950s Idaho and the season of the Chinook—a warm February wind that blows across the flat cookie-sheet plains from the wrong direction. It brings arid earth and hard times, marking the end of childhood for thirteen-year-old Jake Weber and the beginning of trouble for his family....Forward
Readings and events
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News
Carlos Pons Guerra includes Tom Spanbauer along with the other great artists as an important interdisciplinary influence. “... I hope my many sources of inspiration, the worlds I like to inhabit artistically-–in this case, Jean Genet, Almódovar, Tom Spanbauer, ballet archetypes-–are also there, too.”
“Mariposa: A trans, Caribbean re-imagining of Madame Butterfly,” by Gareth Johnson for Gay Star News
Carlos Pons Guerra’s new work in development for DeNada Dance Theatre is Mariposa – a...Forward
I Loved You More by Tom Spanbauer makes Best of 2015: Fiction, Tin House
Congratulations, Tom Spanbauer! I Loved You More included in Tin House’s Best of 2015: Fiction.
Behind the Curtain: Meet the People Who Make the Portland Art World Possible.
Who really creates high culture’s high season? The local specialists behind the scenes.
By Fiona McCann for Portland Monthly Magazine
Who really creates high culture’s high season? The local specialists behind the scenes.
By Fiona McCann for Portland Monthly Magazine
PAGE MAKER
The designer behind every Hawthorne book
Adam McIsaac: CREATIVE DIRECTOR / Hawthorne Books
Forty-one books, on subjects ranging from Portland food to lobotomies: that’s the entire...Forward
Tom Spanbauer novel, I Loved You More, wins a Lambda!
27th Annual Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced: Congratulations to Tom Spanbauer, Winner of Gay General Fiction for I Loved You More!
Finalists include:
All I Love and Know, Judith Frank,...Forward
OPEN LETTER: DISCLOSURE AND CONJURANCE, BY TOM SPANBAUER
“WE MUST LOOK INWARD AT THE WILDERNESS.”
I’m always writing things down on slips of paper. One day, I found this quotation on a slip of paper laying on my writing desk. The problem with the quote...Forward
On the Hawthorne Books Blog
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Elsewhere