Tim Tomlinson

Tim Tomlinson is a co-founder of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing.

He was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island where, on his sixteenth birthday, he dropped out of high school to pursue an apprenticeship on the road (and, in his case, on the sea, and under it). Over five years he roamed from New England and upstate New York, to South Carolina, South Florida, New Orleans, and eventually the Bahamas, where he crewed on the RV Goldenrod. He returned to New York to study at Columbia University, where he took a BA in Film and an MFA in Fiction.

He has lived in London, Florence, Shanghai, Cha'am in Thailand, and Manila, all of which continue to inform his stories and poems. Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse (Finishing Line Press) offers the voices of survivors of super-typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), which devastated the island of Leyte in the Philippines. About his first poetry collection, Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire, Jamaican-American novelist/poet Jacqueline Bishop writes, "With these poems Tim Tomlinson forages and forges a confrontation with the sublime." About his story collection This Is Not Happening to You, novelist Barrie Sherwood writes that "reading Tomlinson's prose is like licking something bitter from a very sharp knife." His stories and poems have appeared in numerous venues, including Another Chicago Magazine, Columbia Journal, Joao Roque Literary Journal, Litro, and elsewhere. And they've been anthologized in Long Island Noir, A Feast of Narrative, Telephone: A Game of Art Whispered Around the World, and Surviving Suicide: A Collection of Poems That May Save a Life (Nirala Press).

Currently he lives in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches in NYU's Global Liberal Studies program.