Judge read, not dread

Oh, yes, he did. SN&R’s 2007 Flash Fiction Contest judge read all 10 finalists carefully to arrive at his decision.

Brad Buchanan is an assistant professor of English at Sac State, where he teaches creative writing as well as British and post-colonial literature. Canadian by birth, he has basked in the warm glow of Northern California for more than a decade and now lives in East Sacramento with his wife and daughter.

Buchanan holds degrees from McGill University, the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, and is hopeful that his days as a student are finally well and truly over. His academic articles have appeared in journals such as Twentieth-Century Literature, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Men and Masculinities, as well as in the occasional poorly marketed scholarly book.

His creative work has been published in more than 100 journals worldwide, including his national magazine, Canadian Literature, and its nominal American equivalent, American Poets and Poetry. His book-length study of the fiction of the (steeply declining) British author Hanif Kureishi was published this year by Palgrave Macmillan Press, and he has no plans to write anything further about Mr. Kureishi, regardless of financial incentives.

He has also published one book of poetry (The Miracle Shirker, 2005), has three separate novels in various stages of incompleteness, and is currently working on a collection of short stories cautiously entitled Previous Experience. He is also surprisingly active in the Sacramento literary community: a member of the board of directors of the Sacramento Poetry Center, he sporadically co-edits the Tule Review, and acts as an opinionated visiting poet and stern judge in the Poetry Out Loud national recitation contest.