Lee Gutkind

Lee Gutkind is an American writer, speaker, and literary innovator, founder of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction, the first and the largest literary journal to publish narrative/creative nonfiction exclusively. 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, immersing himself in diverse worlds, sometimes for months or years, to produce creative nonfiction portraits about subjects such as the motorcycle subculture, child and adolescent mental illness, baseball umpires, veterinary medicine and organ transplantation.

Currently he is Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes and Professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.

Gutkind was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and educated at the University of Pittsburgh. 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.

His immersion experiences into the motorcycle subculture, the organ transplant milieu, baseball umpires, and in other un-mined worlds about which he has written, along with the literary techniques he has developed, has helped to create a new paradigm for writing about the world — the “literature of reality” that is creative nonfiction.

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. Gutkind is author of You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction, From Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything In Between. Gutkind has written 15 books, and edited 18 collections and volumes. In celebration of his impact on the genre, In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction, was published in 2004 by W.W. Norton. Book List called In Fact “an electrifying anthology . . . an exciting and defining creative nonfiction primer.”

Vanity Fair Magazine proclaimed Gutkind “the Godfather” behind the creative nonfiction movement, and Harper’s Magazine noted that he is “the leading figure behind the creative nonfiction movement.”

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