About

Photo by Jane Siddall Thomas

Dawn at home in Bmore, with Mimsy.

Silhouette as first-grader. By Eileen Fitzgibbons, Naubuc Elementary School, ca. 1970

"What do you write?"
People often ask this, and there's no easy answer. I write about what captures my fancy. I write about what troubles me. I write toward what I don't understand.

Fiction or nonfiction of whatever length, my subjects vary: a circus tent burning, a mysterious letter, my online ordination, stories inspired by legends of dragons and stone knights, the Los Angeles Rams, Truman Capote, H.L. Mencken, the discovery of anesthesia, a 16th-century French swordswoman, the Velvet Underground, my neighbors, people I love, a chilly afternoon on a park bench in Kraków talking with young people about war and literature.

Brief bio
Michael Downs is the author of three books, including most recently the novel, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist. His awards include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Fulbright Scholar award through which he wrote and taught in Krakow, Poland. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Extended bio
My three books are all set in my hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. First came House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), combining literary journalism and memoir to tell the stories of five young men I met while working as a newspaper reporter in Hartford. Winner of the River Teeth Prize for Literary Nonfiction, the book explores questions of what people owe the communities that raised them, and how much an individual needs to sacrifice to support that community.

For the The Greatest Show: Stories (Louisiana State University Press, 2012), I turned to fiction to explore the aftermath of the historic Hartford Circus Fire of 1944, which killed 168 people. Beginning with the big top fire itself and following generations over some sixty years, the stories ask about the burdens that come with memories and the solace that comes with forgetting. The book was written with support from a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

To write my most recent book, The Strange and True Tale of Horace Wells, Surgeon Dentist, I traveled farther back: to 19th-century Hartford and the story of the real-life dentist who introduced general anesthesia to the world. In this novel, I mined the gaps in the historical record to imagine the life of Horace Wells who, working with nitrous oxide, performed surgery without pain, ending centuries of human suffering. But Wells's obsession with pain and its destruction ultimately threatened his family, his finances, and his sanity. Acre Books published the novel in May 2018.

As a speaker or visiting writer, I've appeared at the Mark Twain House in Hartford; the Oxford Conference for the Book, the Louisiana Book Festival, and several universities, colleges, and high schools.

My freelance articles have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, AARP: The Magazine, Baltimore Magazine, The Hartford Courant, Baltimore Style, and Baltimore Fishbowl. With author Jim Hock, I worked to research and write Hollywood's Team: Grit, Glamour, and the 1950s Los Angeles Rams (Rare Bird Books, 2016). I've also worked as a book doctor and as a writing consultant/coach, often through my affiliation with Gotham Ghostwriters.

Journalism gave me my start in professional writing. I covered everything from sports to crime to government for newspapers in Arizona, Connecticut, Arkansas, and Montana.

Later, I taught, mostly at Towson University in Maryland as a professor of creative writing, I also directed the graduate program in professional writing. Earlier, I taught journalism at the University of Montana and at the American Indian Journalism Institute. My first classroom forays happened at the University of Arkansas, where I earned my Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing.

Currently, I teach creative writing for Johns Hopkins University's M.A. in writing program. In 2021-22, I served as a U.S. Fulbright scholar in Kraków, Poland, affiliated with and teaching creative writing for Jagiellonian University.

My work has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, among others. I'm happy to serve as president of the board for Good Contrivance Farm, a non-profit writing residency, and on the board of The Baltimore Review.

I live in Baltimore, Maryland, with my wife, Sheri Venema, who is also a writer as well as my first and best editor.