AK Smith Reading Series: Ethan Rutherford, The Peripatetic Coffin

Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, and anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, won the Minnesota Book Award, the Friends of American Writers Award, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. He was born in Seattle, Washington, and received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Minnesota. Before coming to Trinity, he taught at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, and at the MFA program at Hamline University. In the classroom he encourages his students to read as writers, to take their own work seriously, and to understand that even the most compelling stories began simply, as a series of artistic choices.