bio
Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright that lives in Chicago. He is a winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, the Great Lakes Book Award, and the Society of Midland Author's Fiction Prize as well as a finalist for the Story Prize. He is the author of five novels, The Great Perhaps (W.W. Norton 2009,) The Boy Detective Fails (Akashic 2006,) Hairstyles of the Damned (Akashic 2004,) Tender as Hellfire (St. Martin's 1999), and How the Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins 2001.) His short story collections are Demons in the Spring (Akashic 2008) and Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir (TriQuarterly 2005.) His online serial, The Secret Hand, runs through Playboy magazine at playboy.com. His short fiction has been published in the likes of McSweeney's, Witness, TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Washington Square, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR. His non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and Chicago magazine. He was a contributing editor to the now defunct Punk Planet magazine. He is also a professor who teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.