Tom Howard grew up in the New Jersey suburbs of Philadelphia, in a town known at the time mostly for its railroad underpass, and for an aging and apocalyptic drive-in movie theater that should have been haunted, but wasn’t.
After leaving New Jersey, he earned an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research.
His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Booth, Bennington Review, Carve, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. Individual stories have received the Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Fiction, the Ninth Letter Literary Awards Prize, the Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction, the Willow Springs Fiction Prize, the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, and the Masters Review Short Story Award.
His debut story collection Fierce Pretty Things, winner of the Blue Light Books Prize in Fiction, was published by Indiana University Press.
