Tom Lutz

Tom Lutz is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at University of California at Riverside, and founding editor and publisher of The Los Angeles Review of Books and LARB Books.

His books include Portraits, a collection of photographs and flash essays; two novels, the forthcoming Archipelago and Born Slippy; a book on the philosophy of the essay, Aimlessness; three volumes of travel writing — The Kindness of Strangers, Drinking Mare's Milk on the Roof of the World, and And the Monkey Learned Nothing; the cultural history Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums, which won the American Book Award; Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, a New York Times Notable Book; Cosmopolitan Vistas, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; and American Nervousness, 1903, also a New York Times Notable Book. They have been translated into 12 languages and have appeared on NY Times and LA Times bestseller lists. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, Chicago Tribune, Die Zeit, ZYZZYVA, Exquisite Corpse, Salon.com, Iowa Review, LitHub, Black Clock, American Literary History, and other newspapers and literary venues, as well as in scores of books and academic journals. 

He is the editor in chief of LARB Books, and the editor of a fifty books for it and for other presses, including These ‘Colored’ United States: African American Essays from the 1920s. He is the founding editor of the LARB Quarterly Journal and founding director of the LARB Radio Hour and LARB Publishing Workshop. He has taught at Stanford University, University of Iowa, CalArts, University of Copenhagen, and now at UC Riverside. He has written for film and television and is creator and executive producer of The Key, a limited series historical drama, currently in development. He is working on a number of projects, including a series of lectures for Sam Harris’s Waking Up app and website, a nonfiction book and website on 1925, and a new novel.