Peter Rock

Who is Peter Rock?

Peter Rock is an American novelist born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is a professor of creative writing at Reed College and lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and daughters.

He attended Deep Springs College and received a BA in English from Yale University. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at the Stanford Writing Program from 1995-1997. The manuscript for his novel This Is the Place won the Henfield Award in 1996. Before joining Reed in 2001, he taught fiction at the University of Pennsylvania, at San Francisco State University and at Yale. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1998.

In 2010, Rock's novel My Abandonment received an Alex Award by the American Library Association. It also won the Utah book award and was optioned for film.

His short stories have appeared in Tin House, Zoetrope: All-Story, One Story, and other literary magazines. Many of these stories are compiled in The Unsettling.

Rock’s fiction often focuses on characters on the fringe of society—outsiders, wanderers—and allows his readers to see into the minds of these otherwise invisible characters.