Scibona, Salvatore

Born: 1975

Ohio connection: Birth

Parma

Writer Salvatore Scibona was born in Parma, Ohio, to an ethnic Italian-Polish family.  In 1997 he graduated from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in 1999 he earned an M.F.A. from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.  In 2000 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship; he used it to travel to Italy for research for his first novel, The End (Graywolf Press, 2008).  For two consecutive years (2001-2002 and 2002-2003), Scibona was awarded a writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The End was a 2008 National Book Award finalist; it has been published in several languages, including French, German and Italian.

Scibona always wanted to be a writer and began writing novels before anything else, as he explained in a Q&A on the Web site for his debut novel: “I was always working on novels. I started writing a novel in the fifth grade; a rip-off of the Susan Cooper Dark Is Rising books, and stayed with it for about four years until I gave it up and started another one. … In retrospect they were exercises, although it was important that at the time I thought they were the real thing.”  Scibona’s publishing career began in 2004 with short fiction.  His stories have been published in a number of periodicals, such as the Threepenny Review, A Public Space, The New Yorker, The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, D di La Repubblica, and Il Sole 24 Ore, as well as in anthologies such as Best New American Voices (Hartcourt, 2004); The Pushcart Prize XXIX (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004). Scibona’s work in both formats has won major awards.

Salvatore Scibona is the Frank B. Weeks Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. 

Awards:
Twice awarded a writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, 2001 and 2002; National Book Award finalist for The End, 2008; Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library, 2009; Norman Mailer Cape Cod Writing Award, 2009; Whiting Writers’ Award, 2009; awarded Guggenheim Fellowship, 2010; selected as “20 under 40: Fiction Writers to Watch” by The New Yorker, 2010; Pen/O.Henry Award for “The Woman Who Lived in the House,” 2012. In 2013, Salvatore Scibona won the Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award for his novel-in-progress Where In the World Is William Wurs?

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