Photo by Alpana Singh

Chicago-native Charles Blackstone is the co-editor of the literary anthology, The Art of Friction (University of Texas Press, 2008), which features stories, essays, and hybrids by Bernard Cooper, Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diáz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Wendy McClure, and Achy Obejas. His debut novel, The Week You Weren't Here (Low Fidelity Press, 2005) follows the travails of Hunter Flanagan, an English major in his senior year at the University of Illinois, Chicago along his quest for love and meaning. Chicago Public Radio included the novel in its Summer Book Bag (simulcast on WTTW TV's Chicago Tonight) and features Blackstone as one of its "Writers' Block Party" regular contributors. His recent short fiction has appeared in Esquire's Napkin Fiction Project (the piece was also selected for the &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Fiction anthology) and Canada's Metazen. His short plays have been produced by Victory Gardens and Lifeline Theaters. Over the past years, Blackstone has read his work at the Hyde Park Art Center, Barbara's Bookstore, Book Cellar, Bookslut Series, Quimby's, Subterranean, Dollar Store Series, Black Dog Tavern, Lake Forest College, Scoozi!, and Sunday Salon Series. Recently, he was interviewed as part of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography's podcast series. Blackstone and his wife, Master Sommelier and television personality Alpana Singh presented "Wine in Literature," at the 2008 Chicago Tribune Printer's Row Book Fair. At the annual AWP conference in 2009, he participated in a panel, "Docufiction: When is Fiction [Not] History?" with novelists Cris Mazza, Ted Pelton, and Ricardo Cortez Cruz.

Blackstone holds degrees from UIC and the University of Colorado, where he directed the Graduate Reading Series and received the Barker Award for Fiction. He was appointed visiting writer at Shimer College in 2009, and will return to the campus to teach another workshop this summer. Blackstone has taught at Colorado, Wright College, The University of Chicago's Graham School, and coaches writers at all stages of the publication process on an individual basis. Blackstone and Singh live with their pug, Haruki Murakami, in downtown Chicago.