Richard Spilman

Richard Spilman was born and raised in Normal, IL and holds a BA from Illinois Wesleyan, an MA from San Francisco State and a PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton.  His collection of short stories, Hot Fudge, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1990, of which Joseph Heller said, "An outstanding talent of remarkable versatility.... Richard Spilman writes with telling imagination about men and women, about the young and the elderly, about people who know and people who do not. In Hot Fudge he has given us a book that is humorous, ironic, and perceptive, a work of honesty and integrity that is always deeply moving." R.V. Cassill praised the book's "Uncommon precision and elegance." Carolyn Chute said, "Richard Splman is a writer who makes so many varied characters his own, who makes them turbulent, disconcerting, and yet universal and plain, that he has mastered not just his fictional world, but he has mastered us, his readers."

Of his recent award-winning chapbook, Suspension, David Slavitt, the judge who chose it, said, "[T]he steady and appetitive gaze he brings to experience, his way of looking at and through the phenomena of the world for eveidence of order or grounds for faith reminds me of Herbert's intensity, and this is a rare and excellent thing."