Alexander Luft is a writer and teacher in the Chicago area. He holds Ph.D.s from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
Alex’s fiction and essays have appeared in Yemassee, The Chestnut Review, Midwestern Gothic, The Coachella Review, TINGE and other literary magazines. You can read his work here.
Alex’s scholarly interests include American literature, media studies and disability studies. He has contributed multiple reviews to American Book Review and has placed an essay on Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News in cinder, an Australian journal devoted to creative practice. His essay, “The New Kid in Primetime: What Speechless Has To Say” appears in Beginning with Disability: A Primer (Routledge, 2017), for which he served as a contributing editor. Alex has presented at numerous conferences, including The North American Review 50th Anniversary Conference, the Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference and the Midwestern Modern Language Association’s annual meeting.
Alex has taught courses in creative writing, American and British literature, composition, journalism and media studies. He first taught at the University of Missouri in 2012 before teaching at UIC, Macquarie and Roosevelt University.
Trained as a magazine journalist, Alex received a B.J. in magazine writing from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 2009. He returned to MU and earned his M.A. in English in 2013. He was accepted to UIC that year as a Betty Smith Stuart Fellow.
He lives with his dinosaur-obsessed son and a rescue dog at his wife’s house in McHenry County, Illinois.
Alexander Luft 