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Andrew Foster Altschul is an American fiction writer. He is the author of the novels Deus Ex Machina, which Michael Schaub, in his NPR review, called "brilliant... one of the best novels about American culture in years," and Lady Lazarus, and his short fiction and essays have been published in Esquire, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Fence, and One Story. His short story "Embarazada" was selected for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 and his short story "A New Kind of Gravity" was anthologized in both Best New American Voices 2006 and the O.Henry Prize Stories 2007.
In 2016, with Mark Slouka, he co-authored Writers On Trump, an open letter opposing the candidacy of Donald Trump for President that was signed by nearly 500 writers, including ten winners of the Pulitzer Prize. He has written for political venues including The Huffington Post and Truthdig, was a contributing author of Where to Invade Next (McSweeney's, 2008), and was the co-organizer of the Progressive Reading Series, a series of literary readings in San Francisco that raised money for progressive political candidates from 2004-2008. From 2008-2011 he was the founding books editor of The Rumpus, an online magazine started by Stephen Elliott in late 2008. He remains a contributing editor to The Rumpus, as well as to the literary journal Zyzzyva.
Altschul was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and then a Jones Lecturer in the Stanford Creative Writing Department.From 2009-2015, he was an associate professor at San Jose State University and the director of their Center for Literary Arts. He currently teaches at Colorado State University. He is married to The New Yorker journalist and fiction writer Vauhini Vara.