Richard Chwedyk
Bio: I grew up on the southwest side of Chicago, west of Midway Airport. It was an endless grid of little houses and neat lawns, where one aspired to blandness and anonymity to get along. Inevitable, then, that I would be attracted to the covers of the sf books and digests, monster magazines and comic books in the local Rexall drugstores or the book section of E. J. Korvette's department store. I loved movies, but paper is cheaper than film stock and the special effects are better. In college, writing teachers tried gently to beat some sense into me to forget all that "science fiction nonsense." Their success was temporary. By the mid-eighties I happily returned to the field that sustained my imagination from my earliest days and kept me questioning the mediocities that were placed before me as received wisdom. Richard Chwedyk has had fiction published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories and Space and Time, and was included in the anthology Chulthu and the Coeds, or Kids and Squids. His novella, "Bronte's Egg," won the Nebula Award. His novelette, "The Measure of All Things" made the Nebula Awards preliminary ballot, was a Sturgeon Award finalist, was a few votes short of the Hugo Awards final ballot and was selected for David Hartwell's and Katherine Cramer's Year's Best SF 7, published by Eos. His poetry has been kicking around for a while, most recently appearing in the webzine Strange Horizons, Tales of the Unanticipated number 23, Tales From the Red Lion (also from Twilight Tales/11th Hour). Forthcoming poetry will appear in Year's Best SF 8 and Snow Monkey magazine. He has a B.A. from Columbia College Chicago and an M.A. from Northwestern University. He has taught Freshman Rhetoric and Composition and currently teaches various creative writing classes for the Alliance for Lifelong Learning program of Oakton Community College. His major paycheck, however, comes from doing layout/copyediting for a chain of suburban newspapers in the Chicago suburbs. He has moderated and coordinated writing workshops at a number of recent worldcons and regional conventions. He often reads in the Chicago area--where he lives with his wife, poet Pamela Miller--most frequently at the Twilight Tales reading series at the Red Lion Pub (where early drafts of "The Measure of All Things" and "Bronte's Egg" were first presented).
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