photo credit: author and musician, Nate LeBoutillier

Bio:

Thomas Maltman’s first novel, The Night Birds, won an Alex Award, a Spur Award, and the Friends of American Writers Literary Award. In 2009 the American Library Association chose The Night Birds as an “Outstanding Book for the College Bound.” Little Wolves, his second novel, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and won the All Iowa Reads selection in 2014. He teaches at Normandale Community College and lives in the Twin Cities area with his wife, a Lutheran pastor, and his three daughters. His third novel, The Land, was published by Soho Press in October, 2020. In July of 2025, Soho Press will publish his fourth novel, Ashes to Ashes.

Contact:

Email me at:  tmaltman@gmail.com for publicity materials, questions, or conversations about books.

My publicist at Soho Books is Paul Oliver. He can be reached at poliver@soho;press

Interviews and Feature Pieces:

• A favorite work of writing about first-year teaching at Literary Hub called “Lessons in Humility from Teaching in the Mojave Desert”
• “Thomas Maltman’s Dreams Become Fiction” feature with Amy Goetzman at MINNPOST
• Interview at History Through Fiction podcast along with Colin Mustful
• Reading from The Land along with Lin Enger at an event hosted by Books & Books
• Interview with Steve Usery at Mysterypod about Little Wolves
• Little Wolves Music Playlist and Book Notes at Largehearted Boy
• “The Page 69 Test” and “Writers Read” at Campaign for the American Reader

A Few of My Favorite Things:

Books on Writing

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King

Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott

Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern

The Art of Fiction, John Gardner

The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo

Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser

Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster

The Writer’s Journey:  Mythic Structure for Writers, Christopher Vogler

Novels

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell

Dune, Frank Herbert

The King Must Die, Mary Renault

Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech

Staggerford, Jon Hassler

Giants in the Earth, O.E. Rolvaag

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Grendel, John Gardner

The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman

My Antonia, Willa Cather

Wicked, Gregory Maguire

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

Watership Down, Richard Adams

The Book of Lost Things, John Connolly

Farenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Vision Quest, Terry Davis

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K LeGuin

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

Plainsong, Kent Haruf

Short Fiction

Erratics, Roger Hart

The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

Light at the Crossing, Kent Meyers

The Best Stories of Anton Chekov

A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor

Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link

Graveyard of the Atlantic, Alyson Hagy

Music of the Inner Lakes, Roger Sheffer

Anything by Alice Munro

Nonfiction

The Summer of Ordinary Ways, Nicole Helget

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer

The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie

Population 485, Michael Perry

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell

The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton

Poets and Favorite Poems

Dylan Thomas “Fern Hill”

Nance Van Winckel “Bad Girl with Hawk”

Rainer Maria Rilke “For the Sake of a Single Poem”

Mary Oliver “In the Pinewoods, Crows and Owl”

Tony Hoagland “Self Improvement”

Richard Robbins “Famous Persons We Have Known”

Ted Kooser “Pearl”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning “Sonnet XXII”

Gwen Hart “Anniversary”

Shel Silverstein “They’ve put a Brassiere on the Camel”

William Butler Yeats “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”

Richard Wilbur “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”

Sharon Olds “Size and Sheer Will”

Stephen Dobyns “Black Dog, Red Dog”

Li-Young Lee “The Gift”

W.S. Merwin “For the Anniversary of my Death”

ee cummings “somewhere I have never traveled gladly beyond”

Elizabeth Bishop “The Moose”

James Wright “A Blessing”