# Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn (born January 26, 1960) is an American writer, playwright, and poet.

## Life and career

Nick Flynn was raised by his mother in Scituate, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.
Flynn had no contact with his father throughout most of his childhood and adolescence as his parents separated when he was six months old. As a child, he was discouraged from pursuing a writing career because his father had identified himself as a writer to his mother when they first met. Flynn claims that, along with his father's alcoholism, a reason for his parents' separation was his father's "delusion of greatness" directly connected to his being an artist. Flynn first became an electrician instead of a writer after graduating high school, because of the stigma associated with the latter.
At 20, he was offered a scholarship to study English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He studied with Fred Robinson, who was then married to Marilyn Robinson—she would sometimes teach his classes. It was at UMass that Flynn was first exposed to contemporary poetry, in a workshop taught by James Tate. In fall of 1982 Flynn's mother committed suicide. Subsequently unable to continue with his studies, Flynn dropped out of school and ended up working at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston. He took classes at various colleges and universities over the next several years to finish his undergraduate degree, while living in the Fort Point Channel on a boat he and a friend had renovated.
When he was 27, Flynn was unexpectedly reunited with his father at the Pine Street Inn, when his then-homeless father showed up as a "guest". At 29, Flynn began therapy, got sober, and began taking poetry workshops, first with Carolyn Forche, then with Marie Howe. The following year he was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he became friends with Jacqueline Woodson, Tim Seibles, Paul Lisicky, Mark Doty, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, Carl Phillips, and others. In 1992, he moved to Brooklyn to pursue his Master of Arts in poetry at New York University. At NYU, he studied with Sharon Olds, Phil Levine, Galway Kinnell, William Matthews, and Allen Ginsberg.
From 1992 to 1999, he was a member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, in which he served as an educator and consultant in New York public schools. He left Brooklyn in 1999 for a second fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, where he finished his first book of poems, Some Ether (2000), begun ten years earlier. That same year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, which allowed him to live in Rome from 2001 to 2003. While in Rome he finished work on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, as well as traveling extensively, mainly to Dublin, Paris, and Tanzania. It was in Rome where he met and became friends with Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper. Flynn collaborated on Sauper's Academy Awards nominated documentary Darwin's Nightmare—traveling to Tanzania for the filming and to Paris for the editing.
Flynn's poems, essays, and nonfiction have been featured in The New Yorker, Paris Review, National Public Radio's This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review.
Since 2004, Flynn has been a Professor on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Houston, where he is in residence each Spring, teaching workshops in poetry and interdisciplinary / collaborative art.
In 2009, he married his long-time partner, actress Lili Taylor. Flynn and Taylor live in Brooklyn with their daughter, Maeve.

## Books

This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020) circles around the lingering effects of his mother having set their house on fire when he was six years old. It is a hybrid of several genres, including memoir, fairy tale, theater, police reports, poetry, essay, speculative fiction, and magic realism. It is the sibling to I Will Destroy You (2019), which Flynn revised by performing each poem with his band Killdeer over the five years of its writing.
Stay: threads, conversations, collaborations (2020) gathers together 30 years of Flynn's writing, alongside his collaborations with artists, including Jack Pierson, Catherine Opie, Kevin Jerome Everson, Sarah Lipstate, Paul Weitz, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Sarah Sentilles, Amy Arbus, Ryan McGinley, Zoe Leonard, Mark Adams, Bill Schuck, Guy Barash, Mel Chin, M. P. Landis, Jared Handelsman, Alix Lambert, Gabriel Martinez, Douglas Padgett, Kahn & Selesnick, Josh Neufeld, David Brody, Daniel Heyman, Mischa Richter, Jim Peters / Kathleen Carr, and Marilyn Minter.
The Reenactments (2013) chronicles Flynn's experience during the making of Being Flynn, a 2012 film based on his acclaimed 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. His readings on neuroscience and memory, including books by V. S. Ramachandran, David Eagleman, and Antonio Damasio, helped him to comprehend his experience of being on set for the reenactment of his mother's death by Julianne Moore. My Feelings (2015) is the sibling to The Reenactments.
In The Ticking Is the Bomb (2009), his second memoir, Flynn explored U.S. state-sanctioned torture, as well as his decision to have a child. The title was inspired by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who Flynn has studied with since 1990. It is the sibling to The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), which continued on similar themes.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), a New York Times Bestseller, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, was a finalist for France's Prix Femina, and has been translated into fifteen languages. It documents Flynn's years working at The Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston. It uses a form of lyric reportage to examine the creation of homelessness in the U.S., as well as his relationship with his father. It includes lyric fragments, short plays, lists, and documents. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is the sibling to his first book of poetry, Some Ether (2000), which won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry in 1999, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
His book Low was published by in 2023.

## Awards

* 2020 Writers' League of Texas Book Award (Finalist), I Will Destroy You
* 2018 Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Residency)
* 2018 Lannan Residency Fellowship (Residency)
* 2015 10 July 2015 proclaimed Nick Flynn Day by Boston Mayor Marty Walsh
* 2014 Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media
* 2011 Atlantic Center for the Arts (Residency)
* 2006 Prix Femina (Finalist), Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
* 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
* 2003 Massachusetts Center for the Book Poetry Award (Finalist), Blind Huber
* 2003 Yaddo (Residency)
* 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship
* 2001 Witter Bynner Fellowship
* 2001 MacDowell Colony (Residency)
* 2001 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship
* 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, Some Ether
* 2000 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Finalist), Some Ether
* 1999 Larry Levis Prize (Virginia Commonwealth University), Some Ether
* 1999 Discovery/The Nation Award
* 1999 Fine Arts Work Center (Residency)
* 1997 Millay Colony for the Arts (Residency)
* 1995 MacDowell Colony (Residency)
* 1995 Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Residency)
* 1991 Fine Arts Work Center (Residency)