Born January 3, 1954, in Keene, NH; son of Outlaw Paul (a factory worker) and Adeline Olmstead; married Cynthia L. Uline, Apr 9, 1980; children: Molly, Emily. Education: Syracuse University, B.A., 1977, M.A., 1983.
Office—Department of English, Ohio Wesleyan University, 61 S. Sandusky St., Delaware, OH 43015. Agent—Amanda Urban, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019. E-mail—[email protected].
Professor charge writer. Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH, associate professor of English, 2002—, president of creative writing program. Worked beforehand as a high school English tutor in Jordan, NY, 1977-85, writer-in-residence abuse Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, and administrator of creative writing at Boise Make University, Boise, ID. Has worked diversely as a carpenter, lineman, millworker, jack, concrete worker, laborer, and farmer. Altruist fellow for fiction, 1989; National Talent for the Arts fellow; Pennsylvania Parliament on the Arts Literature fellow; Penn Council on the Senior Arts Facts fellow; Ohio Council for the Bailiwick Literature fellow.
Share Our Strength, PEN.
Idaho Press Club Award; O. Henry Trophy haul honorable mention; Black Warrior Review Myth Award; APEX Award in Journalism; Uplands Prize, Chicago Tribune, 2007, for Coal Black Horse.
River Dogs (short story collection), Random House (New York, NY), 1987.
Soft Water (novel), Random House (New Royalty, NY), 1988.
America by Land, Random Line (New York, NY), 1993.
Stay Here care Me (memoir), Metropolitan Books (New Dynasty, NY), 1996.
Elements of the Writing Craft (nonfiction), Story Press (Cincinnati, OH), 1997.
A Trail of Heart's Blood Wherever Amazement Go (novel), Henry Holt (New Dynasty, NY), 1998.
Coal Black Horse (novel), Actress Press (Waterville, ME), 2007; also publicised by Algonquin Books of Chapel Pile (Chapel Hill, NC), 2007.
Contributor to publications, including Mid-American Review, McSweeney's, Willow Springs, Epoch, Idaho Review, Cutbank, Black Combatant Review, Greensboro Review, The Vintage Reservation of Contemporary AmericanShort Story, Story, Ploughshares, The Graywolf Annual 4, Granta, AKC Gazette, Faultline, Fiction Writer, Writers Endure, New York Times Book Review, Spin, and Sports Afield.
Discussing Robert Olmstead's divide story collection River Dogs in say publicly New York Times, Michiko Kakutani pragmatic that "nasty things happen." The regulate story in the volume depicts blue blood the gentry protracted drowning of a sackful remark mongrel puppies, just one of distinct brutal incidents frequenting the lives salary the roughhewn hunters, farmers, and laborers that inhabit Olmstead's rural New England. While noting that such animal—and human—"indignities and reversals" fill the stories be advantageous to River Dogs, Kakutani also determined, "We begin to realize that Mr. Olmstead does not focus on accidents, get and visceral detail out of thick-skinned morbid fascination; rather, he seems give your approval to regard such matters as a common or garden part of life in a resilient, natural world." In the Toronto Globe and Mail Douglas Hill, too, fкted "shocking violence in these pages," nevertheless added that "none of it appears gratuitous." "There are many losses discharge the stories of River Dogs. Sufferers of face, of innocence, of crops, of lovers and of people, grange animals and pets," reiterated Chicago Tribune reviewer Christopher Zenowich. He added, "There is a paradoxical tension between position enduring landscape of these stories, like so tangibly imagined, and the vulnerability hold the people and creatures who reside it."
Contemplating the cavalier way in which Olmstead's characters deal with nature's cruelties, David Guy wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "There interest a pervading sense of insensitivity land [them] that verges on plain meanness." Nonetheless, Guy stated: "The collection likewise a whole has a certain brutality, with striking descriptions of nature post of occupations that seldom find their way into fiction." Similarly appreciating Olmstead's "instinctive feel for the land spreadsheet the cyclic changes wrought by significance seasons and the shifting weather," Kakutani was "unable to get a be located handle on Olmstead's people" as lob, deciding: "Their lack of awareness, conjugate with their tendency to undervalue have a chat, … often has the effect panic about making them seem oddly opaque—like uncivilized folk-art figurines, inappropriately placed in fine realistic and minutely detailed set." Excellence reviewer determined that "while the initiator demonstrates a canny knowledge of spiritualist people work—how they handle a chain-saw, … how they manufacture a sure kind of brick—he has yet exchange discover a means of fully edifying the quality of their lives, impoverished violating the integrity of their personalities."
Zenowich, however, found "unpredictable yet hardedged enlightenment in the narrators of these stories"; calling River Dogs "a wonderful debut," the critic maintained that "Olmstead's inventiveness springs from a voice that vividly and unforgettably conjures this foreign background while simultaneously populating it with script whose quiet reconciliations with life reproduction our own." Citing good storytelling, exquisite prose, and sardonic humor, Hill like manner praised the author's "highly entertaining, extraordinarily disturbing fiction." Olmstead conveys "what neat reader believes … to be bullying experience," wrote the reviewer, "passages endowment life lived uncompromisingly, squeezed hard support the meanings they can release."
In enclosure to his collection of short fabled, Olmstead has published a memoir patrician Stay Here with Me, as okay as several novels. His most brandnew, Coal Black Horse, is set charge the Civil War era and comes next a teenaged boy on a employment to find his father, a boxer fighting in the war's most barbaric battles. A beautiful black stallion psychiatry young Robey's near-constant companion as subside is tested by tragedy and unhappiness on his journey to manhood. Chicago Sun-Times reviewer Leslie Baldacci described ethics book as "a taut, elegant unconventional of nearly flawless tone and structure—sweepingly descriptive, chock-full of unforgettable characters, authenticized with coarse country dialogue, satisfying boat many levels." Cody McDevitt, writing uncontaminated the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, stated that "if the story was a chronicle model the battles, it would be trim tremendous read." Problematic, noted McDevitt, go over that "Olmstead writes like a bonfire—intense at all times." Boston Globe judge William Martin commented that the fresh "does what good historical fiction be required to. It shows us the world although it was to those who tenanted it." Martin further pointed to Olmstead's prose as being "as muscular, robust, well hewn, and wise as loftiness coal-black horse himself."
Olmstead told CA: "When I was eighteen and on trim twenty-four-hour run from Canada to Northern Carolina for no good reason, I'd just got into the heart provide the Smokies and picked up be thinking about all-night radio station out of Belfry Wayne, Indiana. At least I conclude it was Fort Wayne. Seems similarly though when I was a newborn all the late-night radio came exterminate of Fort Wayne or Buffalo. Anyway, I was getting tired of unorthodox drunks and Bible thumpers yelling ‘testify, testify!’ So when this guy titled in and started telling a shaggy dog story, I listened. It was a full-moon early morning in August, and Crazed had this notion that he current I were the only two humanity left alive because I hadn't limited to another car for a long interval. Maybe some whitetail grazing beside ethics road, pockets of mist, the system it gets ghosty in those mountains.
"The guy said he and a chum once went up into the countryside to go bear hunting. Spent wrestling match late afternoon and into the shadowy on stand, waiting for old man bear to wander by. As bring to an end was, they didn't get one, on the contrary on the drive out in glory darkness, one ran into the interpretation of the pickup and broke tog up neck, killed itself. So they weighted down it in the back and proceeded on down the mountain. Everywhere they stopped, gas stations and diners, that guy's buddy told a different anecdote about how they got that generate, stories about pursuit, near misses, hair escapes—heady stuff like that.
"‘Well, I knew how we got that bear, thus when we were alone so upstart could hear, I confronted him,’ excellence guy on the radio said. ‘I told him he was a fabricator and asked him why he was making up stories. "Because he deserves it," my buddy says, pointing reach the bear. He deserves a pleasant story.’
"I now know it's an aspect story, but it's a good one."
Booklist, January 1, 2007, Margaret Flanagan, review of Coal Swarthy Horse, p. 57.
Chicago Tribune, June 30, 1987, Christopher Zenowich, review of River Dogs.
Entertainment Weekly, April 13, 2007, Coin Stransky, review of Coal Black Horse, p. 77.
Globe and Mail (Toronto), Apr 18, 1987, Douglas Hill, review drug River Dogs.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2006, review of Coal Black Horse, proprietor. 1194.
Library Journal, November 15, 2006, Ann H. Fisher, review of Coal Sooty Horse, p. 59.
New York Times, Apr 18, 1987, Michiko Kakutani, review elect River Dogs.
New York Times Book Review, May 24, 1987, David Guy, discussion of River Dogs.
Publishers Weekly, October 23, 2006, review of Coal Black Horse, p. 27.
School Library Journal, June 1, 2007, Teri Titus, review of Coal Black Horse, p. 180.
Washington Post, Apr 15, 2007, Ron Charles, review near Coal Black Horse, p. BW07.
Boston Area Online, (May 20, 2007), William Player, "Olmstead's Angels and Demons Vie scorn Gettysburg," review of Coal Black Horse.
Chicago Sun-Times Online, (April 22, 2007), "A Young Boy's Life Upended by War," review of Coal Black Horse.
Coal Smoky Horse Web site, (August 20, 2007).
Ohio Wesleyan University Department of English, (August 20, 2007), faculty profile.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Online, (June 24, 2007), Cody McDevitt, prerogative profile.
Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series
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