Matthew Salesses

Author of "Craft in the Real World" and "Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear"

January 10, 2022

Matthew Salesses is the author of the bestsellers "The Hundred-Year Flood," an Adoptive Families Best Book of 2015 and a Best Book of the season at Buzzfeed, Refinery29 and Gawker, among others, and "Craft in the Real World," an NPR and Esquire Best Book of 2021 which explores alternative models of craft and the writing workshop, especially for marginalized writers. His latest novel is the PEN/Faulkner Finalist "Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear," a Thrillist.com and Entropy Best Book of 2020. Previous books include "I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying;" "Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity;" and "The Last Repatriate."

Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. His essays can be found in Best American Essays 2020, NPR Code Switch, The New York Times Motherlode, The Guardian and other venues. His short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, PEN/Guernica and Witness, among others. He has received awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, [PANK], HTMLGIANT, IMPAC, Inprint and elsewhere.

Matthew is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA/Ph.D. program at Oklahoma State University. He earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Emerson College. He serves on the editorial boards of Green Mountains Review and Machete (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press), and has held editorial positions at Pleiades, The Good Men Project, Gulf Coast and Redivider. He has read and lectured widely at conferences and universities and on TV and radio, including PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera America, various MFA programs and the Tin House, Kundiman and One Story writing conferences.

About "Craft in the Real World" 

A groundbreaking resource for fiction writers, teachers and students, this manifesto and practical guide challenges current models of craft and the writing workshop by showing how they fail marginalized writers, and how cultural expectations inform storytelling.

The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing–including plot, character, conflict, structure and believability–and aspects of workshop–including the silenced writer and the imagined reader– Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces?

Drawing from examples including "One Thousand and One Nights," "Curious George," "Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea" and the Asian American classic "No-No Boy," Salesses asks us to reimagine craft and the workshop. In the pages of exercises included here, teachers will find suggestions for building syllabi, grading and introducing new methods to the classroom; students will find revision and editing guidance, as well as a new lens for reading their work. Salesses shows that we need to interrogate the lack of diversity at the core of published fiction: how we teach and write it. After all, as he reminds us, “When we write fiction, we write the world.”

About "Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear"

From the bestselling author of "The Hundred-Year Flood" comes an incredibly entertaining and profoundly affecting tour de force about a Korean American man’s strange and ordinary attempts to exist. Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His cat is dead. His wife and daughter have left him. He’s estranged from his adoptive family. People bump into him on the street as if he isn’t there. He is pretty sure he’s disappearing. His girlfriend, Yumi, is less convinced. But then she runs into someone who looks exactly like her, and her doppelgänger turns out to have dated someone who looks exactly like Matt. Except the other Matt was superior in every way. He was clever, successful, generous and beloved—until one day he suddenly and completely vanished without warning. How can Matt Kim protect his existence when a better version of him wasn’t able to? Or is his worse life a reason for his survival? Set in a troubling time in which a presidential candidate is endorsed by the KKK and white men in red hats stalk Harvard Square, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is a haunting and frighteningly funny novel about Asian American stereotypes, the desires that make us human, puns, and what happens to the self when you have to become someone else to be seen.

URL: https://library-dep.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2022-honorees/matthew-salesses

Last Updated: 19 January 2022