Philip Gambone

"Philip Gambone is an award-winning fiction and nonfiction writer. He has published short stories in many literary magazines and anthologies. A recipient of artist’s fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, he has also been listed in Best American Short Stories, 1989 (Houghton Mifflin).

Phil’s collection of short stories, The Language We Use Up Here, was published by Dutton in 1991. The book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His novel, Beijing (2003) was nominated for two awards, including a PEN/Bingham Award for Best First Novel.

Phil has extensive publishing credits in nonfiction as well. He has contributed numerous essays, reviews, features pieces, and scholarly articles, to several local and national journals including Bay Windows, Christopher Street, The Harvard Crimson, The New York Times Book Review, Italian Americana, and The Boston Globe. He has also written extensively about China for several publications and has contributed chapters to two high school textbooks about ancient and modern China published by Cheng and Tsui.

Phil’s personal essays have appeared in a number of highly praised anthologies, including Hometowns (Dutton), Sister and Brother (Harper San Francisco), Wrestling with the Angel (Riverside), Inside Out (Purdue), The Man I Might Become (Marlowe), Boys Like Us (Avon), Wonderlands (Wisconsin), and Big Trips (Wisconsin).

Phil’s book of interviews, Something Inside: Conversation with Gay Fiction Writers (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), was named one of the “Best Books of 1999” by Pride magazine. His book of profiles, Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), was nominated for an American Library Association award, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Stonewall Book Award.

For forty-four years, Phil taught high school English, mostly in the Boston area. He also taught writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston College, and in the freshman expository writing program at Harvard. At the Harvard Extension School, where he taught for almost three decades, he guided generations of students in the craft of fiction writing. He was twice awarded two Distinguished Teaching Citations by Harvard."