Nick Flynn

At 64 years old, Nick Flynn physical status not available right now. We will update Nick Flynn's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Life and career

Nick Flynn was raised by his mother in Scituate, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb.

Flynn had no contact with his father throughout the majority of his childhood and adolescence, when his parents separated when he was six months old. He was discouraged from writing as a child because his father had identifie himself as a writer to his mother when they first met. Flynn claims that his parents' divorce was mainly due to his father's "delusion of greatness" related to his father's being an artist, as well as his father's alcoholism. After graduating high school, Flynn first became an electrician rather than a writer, owing to the stigma attached to the former.

At 20 years old, he was given a scholarship to study English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Fred Robinson, who was then married to Marilyn Robinson, would occasionally teach his classes. Flynn was first exposed to modern poetry in a UMass workshop taught by James Tate. Flynn's mother died in 1982, he was unable to continue with his studies, so he dropped out and ended up working at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston. Although living in the Fort Point Channel on a boat he and a friend restored, he took classes at various colleges and universities over the next few years to complete his undergraduate degree.

Flynn was reunited with his father at the Pine Street Inn when his then-homeless father appeared as a "guest" when he was 27. Flynn began therapy, became sober, and began teaching poetry, first with Carolyn Forche and then with Marie Howe. He was given 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. He moved to Brooklyn in 1992 to study his Master of Arts in poetry at New York University. He studied with Sharon Olds, Phil Levine, Galway Kinnell, William Matthews, and Allen Ginsberg at NYU.

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 from 1992 to 1999. He left Brooklyn in 1999 for a second fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, where he finished his first book of poetry, Some Ether (2000), ten years ago. He was given a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 and an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, which allowed him to live in Rome from 2001 to 2003. He completed work on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, as well as exploring extensively, mainly to Dublin, Paris, and Tanzania, when he arrived in Rome. It was in Rome that he met and became acquainted with Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper. Flynn worked on the Academy Awards nominated documentary Darwin's Nightmare in Tanzania, filming in Tanzania and editing in Paris.

In The New Yorker, Paris Review, National Public Radio's This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review, Flynn's poems, essays, and nonfiction have been included in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and The New York Times Book Review.

Flynn has been a Professor on the University of Houston's Creative Writing faculty, teaching workshops in poetry and interdisciplinary / collaborative art since 2004.

In 2009, he married actress Lili Taylor, his long-time companion. Flynn and Taylor, as well as their daughter, Maeve, live in Brooklyn.

Source

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)