R. Clifton Spargo

He is the author of the novel Beautiful Fools, which Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer describes as a “marvel of a book” that reminds us of “what we fight for, what we fail to win, and the beauty that abides between.”

The co-creator of our Center for Story & Witness testimonial writing program, Clifton seeks to empower new voices of witness across a range of social justice issues. “Testimony,” he says, “brings to light what our political and social systems push aside, ignore, even actively suppress.”

An Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, Clifton’s award-winning stories have appeared in The Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, SOMA, North American Review, and The Kenyon Review, and his essays on culture and music in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Yale Review, Raritan, Huffington Post, and Chicago Tribune. He is also the author of two books on literature and philosophy, The Ethics of Mourning and Vigilant Memory: Emmanuel Levinas, the Holocaust, and the Unjust Death, published with Johns Hopkins University Press.

Clifton holds master’s degrees from Yale Divinity School and Edinburgh University and a doctorate from Yale University. He has been named a Rotary Foundation Scholar, a Whiting Fellow in the Humanities, the Pearl Resnick Fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Provost’s Fellow at University of Iowa, and Dixon Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at Wittenberg University, among other awards. He currently teaches creative writing at Yale University, splitting his time between New Haven and Chicago, where Center for Story & Witness is based.