About

Tim Bascom is author of a new collection of autobiographical stories titled Climbing Lessons: Stories of Fathers, Sons, and the Bond Between (Light Messages Press, 2020).  He is also the author of two coming-of-age memoirs set in Ethiopia, where his parents worked as missionaries before and during the Marxist Revolution:  Running to the Fire (University of Iowa Press, April, 2015, Finalist for the IndieFab Memoir of the Year) and Chameleon Days (Houghton Mifflin, 2006, winner of the Bakeless Literary Prize in Nonfiction).

Bascom spent half his childhood in Kansas and the other half in East Africa.  He also spent six months in the Philippines on a college internship, later traveling to over 25 countries while working for a non-profit that provided training for writers and editors in developing nations.  He is the author of an additional collection of essays (The Comfort Trap) and a novel (Squatters’ Rites), and his writing has won editor’s prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, being selected for Best American Travel Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction as well as the anthologies Law and Disorder and Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie.

Bascom, who received his MFA degree from the University of Iowa, has twenty years of college teaching experience and has led dozens of writing workshops.  He teaches annually at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival.  He also loves to visit colleges, libraries, and book clubs as a guest author.