Lee Gutkind: Editor and Founder

“A wild book—a crazy suspense story—fascinating stuff”—that’s how host Jon Stewart described Lee Gutkind’s new book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think (W.W. Norton) on The Daily Show (Comedy Central), recently, when the two men squared off in an amusing and enlightening conversation and debate.

Lee’s national TV appearance followed in-depth interviews on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation, the BBC World, Wired.com and rave reviews from the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. Almost Human, which is Gutkind’s 12th book, documents six years of off and on fly-on-the-wall observation of the students and faculty at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute as they imagine, design, build and test robots. It takes place in Pittsburgh, at NASA bases in the U.S. and in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the place on earth most like Mars.

MORE ABOUT LEE GUTKIND

As a motorcyclist, a medical insider, a sailor, a college professor, a mid-life father and a literary whipping boy, Lee has proved to be an unlikely success, as he explains in the explosive and hilarious essays collected in Forever Fat: Essays by the Godfather. His immersion experiences into the motorcycle subculture, the organ transplant milieu and in other heretofore un-mined worlds about which he has written books, including robotics, along with the compelling literary techniques he has developed, has helped to create a new paradigm for writing about the world—the “literature of reality” that is creative nonfiction.

In 1997 Vanity Fair Magazine proclaimed Lee “the Godfather” behind the creative nonfiction movement—an indisputable force whose efforts have helped make the genre the fastest growing in the publishing industry.

In 2004, to coincide with Creative Nonfiction’s tenth anniversary, W.W. Norton published In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction. Book List called In Fact “an electrifying anthology . . . an exciting and defining creative nonfiction primer.” In Fact is now in its fourth printing.

All of Lee’s books have been praised for being simultaneously personal and universally informative. His award-winning Many Sleepless Nights, an inside chronicle of the world of organ transplantation, has been reprinted in Italian, Korean and Japanese editions. An Unspoken Art, a profile of veterinary medicine, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. The University of Southern Illinois Press re-issued Gutkind's book (originally by Dial Press) about major league umpires, The Best Seat In Baseball, But You Have to Stand!, which USA Today called "unprecedented, revealing, startling and poignant."

Former director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and currently Professor of English there, Lee has pioneered the teaching of creative nonfiction, conducting workshops and presenting readings throughout the United States, Europe and Australia.

Lee founded the creative nonfiction program and MFA degree in the genre—the first in the world—at the University of Pittsburgh. He helped found the low-residency MFA program in creative nonfiction at Goucher College and was director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference for 11 years. He is the director and founder of the 412 Creative Nonfiction Literary Festival, a citywide literary event that provides professional development to students and city residents and fosters the strength of the local writing community.

Gutkind frequently crosses genres as a writer, editor and reporter. He is a published novelist and an award-winning documentary filmmaker and served as a consulting editor at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., teaching narrative techniques to reporters, producers and editors on the Science Desk.

In 2004, Gutkind was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Chatham College.

For more information, please visit Lee Gutkind's website.