Paul Skenazy

Paul Skenazy taught literature and writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz for thirty years before retiring to devote full time to his writing. He has published two novels. Temper CA (Miami UP, 2019), won the 2018 Miami University Press Novella Contest. Still Life (Paper Angel Press, 1996) followed in 2021. An autobiographical essay on Chicago and Saul Bellow was a “Notable” in The Best American Essays 2015, and stories and essays have recently appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review and elsewhere. He also revised and edited a posthumous novel by a friend, Arturo Islas (La Mollie and the King of Tears, U. of New Mexico Press). Nonfiction works include a book on James M. Cain, a collection of essays on place in San Francisco literature, and a selection of interviews with Maxine Hong Kingston. For a dozen years, he was a mystery review columnist for the Washington Post, has published more than three hundred reviews for newspapers and magazines nationwide, and was twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing