A B O U T G L E N
Three-time International Horror Guild Award Winner Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Snowman’s Children, The Book of Bunk, Motherless Child, Good Girls, Nothing to Devour, and Infinity Dreams. Hirshberg is also the author of five widely praised story collections: The Two Sams (a Publishers’ Weekly Best Book of 2003), American Morons, The Janus Tree, The Ones Who Are Waving, and Tell Me When I Disappear (forthcoming from Cemetery Dance in 2023). Hirshberg is a five-time World Fantasy Award finalist, and in 2008 won the Shirley Jackson Award for the novelette, “The Janus Tree.” His stories have been selected more than two dozen times for the major best-of-the-year anthologies (Best New Horror, Best Horror the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, etc.). Recent mainstream literary fiction has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review and Carnegie Melon’s Oakland Review, as well as on his Substack, Happy in Our Own Ways, where Glen also publishes music criticism and creative nonfiction.
With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual reading/live music/performance event that toured the west coast of the United States most falls between 2004 and 2015, got featured on National Public Radio, and also made international appearances.
Glen has also taught creative writing for more than two decades, inaugurating a signature program for high school students at Campbell Hall in Studio City, and helping to launch the MFA program at Cal State San Bernardino, where he served as a Fiction Professor. At CSUSB, he founded the CREW project, through which he trained some of his top students every year and then sent them out into the surrounding community to run intensive, months-long creative writing workshops each spring at schools that offer few creative outlets or opportunities. He has since crafted a scaled version of that project through which teenaged writers train with him and then teach under-resourced elementary kids served by community organizations such as L.A.’s Best and the I Have a Dream Foundation.
Currently, Glen continues to oversee various iterations of the CREW project, directs his celebrated creative writing program for secondary students, and offers independent classes and manuscript coaching through his Drones Club West endeavor.
After growing up in Detroit and San Diego, Glen attended college at Columbia University, where he won the Bennett Cerf Prize for Fiction. He earned his MFA and MA at the University of Montana, where he was a Fiction Fellow and Bertha Morton Scholar.
From 1995-2002, he was a regular contributor to L.A. Weekly, and his criticism and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and alternative newspapers across the U.S.
He is the singer, songwriter, and keyboardist with Momzer, whose second album, The Light at Someone Else’s Table, was released the Fall of 2015.
He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his family and cats.