Joseph Cassara

Joseph Cassara

George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair, Associate Professor
Advisor, Thesis Reader.
Email: josephcassara@sfsu.edu
Location: HUM 560
Office Hours:
Tue: 2:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Biography

Joseph Cassara is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel The House of Impossible Beauties (Ecco, 2018), which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, two International Latino Book Awards, the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Fiction Book, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction. It was selected by Barnes & Noble for their Discover Great New Writers program and by WH Smith in the UK for their Fresh Talent program. The novel was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal and was listed as one of the best literary novels of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Library Journal, and the American Librarian Association's Over The Rainbow Booklist.

He holds a BA in English from Columbia University and an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has received fellowships and grants from MacDowell, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Creative Center for the Arts, The Studios of Key West, and California Humanities. 

His second novel, a work of historical fiction about the painter Grant Wood, is forthcoming from Ecco in 2027.