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
There are currently no events featuring Mr. Spanbauer on the calendar.
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
Interview with Tom Spanbauer by Andrew Gurevich for On the Block Radio
Posted by Andrew Gurevich on 28 March 2016
What can a single human being hope to achieve in one lifetime? How do we know our lives have mattered? Is it in the work we do, the people we touch, the love we allow ourselves to experience? To...Forward
Thank you to Books Inc. on Castro Street in San Francisco for hosting Tom Spanbauer
Posted by Rhonda Hughes on 30 June 2014
Hawthorne is grateful for the support of independent bookstores. Thank you all and thank you Books Inc. on Castro in San Francisco for hosting Tom Spanbauer reading from his new novel, I Loved You...Forward
Lidia Yuknavitch's Introduction of Tom Spanbauer at Powell's Books on the event of his book launch for I Loved You More
Posted by Rhonda Hughes on 04 April 2014
If you want an introduction to the work of Tom Spanbauer, one thing you can do is hunt down an author bio. It’ll read something like this: He grew up in Idaho and attended Catholic school, which I’m...Forward
Hawthorne Books Loves You More
Posted by Liz Crain on 03 April 2014
I started working at Hawthorne Books in fall of 2009 and now, 17 books later, I’m proud say that I’ve worked on half of the books that Hawthorne has published since it was founded in 2001....Forward
Two out of eight "Small Press Books to Watch in 2014 (AWP edition)," by Valerie Stivers-Isakova for the Huffington Post, include Tom Spanbauer's I Loved You More and Poe Ballantine's Things I Like About America. Lidia Yuknavitch also cited as a "big star"!
Posted by Rhonda Hughes on 06 March 2014
By all accounts, AWP Seattle 2014 was a wild success!
Thank you to Adam O’Connor Rodriguez for working the Hawthorne booth as well as moderating three panels. Thank you to Scott F. Parker, who...Forward
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