Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter is an American writer of fiction, essays and poetry. He is best known for his 2000 novel The Feast of Love, which was nominated for the National Book Award and adapted into a feature film in 2007. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story in 2021.

His published works include Believers (1997), Saul and Patsy (2003), and Through the Safety Net (1985).

Charles Morley Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1947 to John and Mary Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul in 1969. In 1974, he earned a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he wrote his thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West. “I had no idea what would come next,” he later said, “but I knew it had to involve books.”

Baxter taught at a high school in Pinconning, Michigan, for one year. He then began his academic career at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he joined the English Department at the University of Michigan, where he directed the Creative Writing MFA programme.

He later taught at Stanford University, the University of Iowa and Warren Wilson College. Returning to his home state, Baxter taught at the University of Minnesota, where he retired in 2020.

His fiction often explores how sudden changes shape ordinary life. His early collections include Harmony of the World (1984), which won the Associated Writing Programs Award, and Through the Safety Net (1985). His later short stories were published in Gryphon (2011) and There's Something I Want You to Do (2015).

His non-fiction includes Burning Down the House (1997) and The Art of Subtext (2007), the latter of which won the Minnesota Book Award. His most recent novel, Blood Test (2024), centres on a man whose life unravels after receiving a medical prediction.

Charles Baxter now lives in Minneapolis.