Mark Mayer

Mark Mayer is the award- winning author of the debut story collection Aerialists. In her praise, Marilyn Robinson wrote, “Mayer writes with a luminous, wistful, elegance.”  For Carmen Maria Machado Aerialist was “one of the best collections I’ve read in years.” And Emily Ruskovich called Mayer “a magician of the American sentence.”  Mayer’s novel-in-progress is based on the life of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras.

Mayer holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Denver, and he was awarded the Dana Emerging Writer residency at Cornell’s Center for the Literary Arts. His stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Kenyon Review, Guernica, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and The Best American Mystery Stories. Mayer has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he was awarded the Dana Emerging Writer residency at Cornell University’s Center for the Literary Arts. His fiction has appeared in Guernica, American Short Fiction, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Mayer is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Memphis.