Peter Kispert Books in Order

Peter Kispert grew up in New Hampshire near the Vermont border, with summer visits to his grandfather’s cabin on Cape Cod. He has recalled spending plenty of time outside on his own, in the woods and near the water. Those places still feel important to the way he thinks about solitude, shame, belonging, and the need to be seen.

He went on to earn an MFA in fiction from Indiana University. During that period, he taught undergraduate fiction workshops and worked with Indiana Review, eventually serving as its editor-in-chief. He also helped found Blue Light Books, an annual prize connected with Indiana University Press.

Writing and editing have always been closely linked in his career.

Kispert’s fiction often begins with a small, uncomfortable lie. In interviews, he has spoken about struggling in graduate school to write toward other people’s ideas of what a story should be. He instead began writing from feelings he knew well, including the uneasy distance between accepting oneself privately and allowing oneself to be seen by others.

That choice shaped I Know You Know Who I Am, his 2020 debut story collection. Its characters bend the truth for reasons that can seem trivial at first, then discover that even a small invention can take over a relationship. The title story follows a man who hires an actor to play a friend he made up, hoping to hide his loneliness from his boyfriend.

The book moves between close-up relationship stories and stranger, more speculative premises. In “Aim for the Heart,” a lie about hunting leaves a man with a deer carcass and old memories he would rather avoid. In “Rorschach,” a theater producer oversees a grotesque public spectacle involving death-row prisoners, while private desire and guilt close in around him.

The stories can be funny, but they don't let anyone off the hook.

Queer characters, shifting personas, loneliness, and the hard work of intimacy recur throughout Kispert’s work. He is interested in performance in the everyday sense, the versions of ourselves we present to friends, lovers, strangers, and even to ourselves. His characters may make bad choices, but the stories stay alert to the fear and hope beneath those choices.

Alongside his writing, Kispert has built a career in publishing and teaching. He previously taught creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and served as editor-in-chief of The Florida Review. His essays and fiction have appeared in publications including GQ, Esquire, Story, Sewanee Review, and The New York Times Book Review.

He now works as an associate editor at William Morrow and lives in New York. That editor’s eye shows up in his fiction too, especially in the careful compression of his shorter work and his attention to what a character leaves unsaid.