Nick Flynn
Postgraduate Writers' Conference Faculty
Profile
Nick Flynn’s acclaimed 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, recounts his childhood and family life, following the uncanny trajectory that ultimately led his homeless father to seek refuge at the Pine Street Inn, a Boston shelter, while Nick worked there.
The book was made into the film Being Flynn, starring Robert DeNiro and Julianne Moore, and translated into fifteen languages. Flynn’s latest is the hybrid memoir, This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire. Published by W.W. Norton in 2020, it alternates literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir and the bedtime stories he tells his daughter to probe his deepest ethical dilemmas. He is also the author of The Reenactments (2013) and The Ticking Is the Bomb (2010), which addresses the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Flynn’s multi-genre body of work includes five collections of poetry from Graywolf Press, most recently I Will Destroy You (2019.) His poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. He has been awarded fellowships from The Guggenheim Foundation, The Library of Congress, The Amy Lowell Trust, and The Fine Arts Work Center. Flynn teaches creative writing at University of Houston, and splits his time between Houston and Brooklyn, New York. This is his first time joining our VCFA Conference faculty.