Obligatory Biographical Blurb
James Black’s attempt to conquer the Atlantic coast was foiled when UPS returned a key component of his superlaser after three unsuccessful delivery attempts. Having failed at supervillainy, he continues to sling drinks, wondering if someday he’ll have too many degrees to be a bartender. He no longer smokes, he drinks his tequila neat, and writes only in the dead of night, his lap warmed by a three-legged cat. His fiction has been published in The Wisconsin Review, Natural Bridge, Redivider, The Palo Alto Review, Willard & Maple, Amoskeag, and several other places. |
 Influences
Always a tricky thing to gauge: the writers whom a writer will say have influenced him may well have done so in such ways that their presence isn’t visible to those outside his own experience. And the writers whom others will assert have assuredly determined the shape of any given author’s prose may, in fact, be writers that that given author has never even read. Case in point: “The chair of the English department at one university I attended,” explains Black, “said I had clearly paid close attention to the lessons on language and craft inherent in the fiction of T.C. Boyle. This is a fine and exciting compliment: Boyle is one of America’s most lauded contemporary writers. Nevertheless, I’d never read a word he’d written until after that comment. And when I did (I read his story collection Descent of Man), I remained completely clueless as to how someone could have confused us for kindred spirits.” So, to most honestly address the question, the following list comprises those authors of whom Black can say that he “emerged from one or more of their texts with a desire and intention to consciously change” the way he writes: Kurt Vonnegut Kevin Brockmeier Douglas Coupland Steven Sherrill Kazuo Ishiguro Dan Chaon Italo Calvino David Foster Wallace |
| Recommended: Books & Stories That Have Changed Me & Which You Too Should Read |
 Credentials
SUNY Brockport (Brockport, NY) Master of Arts, Creative Writing GPA: 4.0
SUNY Brockport (Brockport, NY) Bachelor of Sciences, English Literature GPA: 4.0
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