Biographical Notes

Adam Langer is an author, journalist, playwright and filmmaker. His work has been featured most recently on NPR’s Selected Shorts (read by Teri Garr), in The Best Men’s Stage Monologues 2000 (Smith & Kraus) and The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2000 (Smith & Kraus), as well as in the Chicago Reader’s Fiction Issue, and in the literary magazine, Salt Hill. He is the author of two novels and three nonfiction reference works: “Crossing California” and “The Washington Story,” “CitySmart Guide to Chicago,” “Film Festival Guide,” and “The Madness of Art.”

Crossing California, one of the most successful literary debuts of 2004, was selected by Amazon.com as one of the top fifty books of the year, #2 in Fiction (second to Philip Roth) and #1 in Debut Fiction. It was chosen by Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of 2004, was a BookSense pick, and was nominated for the Borders Original Voices Award.

His plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and numerous other cities throughout the United States. Among the companies that have produced his work are Cave 76, Todo Con Nada, Theater 22, Shattered Globe, Victory Gardens, Circle Rep, Ensemble Studio Theater, Chicago Dramatists Workshop, Zebra Crossing, Magic Theater, One Arm Red, and The Theater of Serviceable Villains. His 2000 play, Coaster, received rave reviews from numerous publications, including the Chicago Sun-Times (“Highly Recommended. A small chunk of pure gold…worthy of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth.”) and the Chicago Tribune (“Critic’s Choice: The stuff dreams are made of”).

He is the writer and director of the film The Blank Page, distributed by Troma. The film has been seen in New York, Chicago, London and on Scandinavian television. The film was lauded by the Chicago Tribune (“A triumph”) and Time Out (“Hilarious and cruel.”).

As a journalist, he worked as a features writer and theater critic for the Chicago Reader and has had his work published in numerous newspapers and periodicals, including Mother Jones, the Chicago Tribune, Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone.

He holds a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.A. from the University of Illinois. He was a playwright-in-residence at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a winner of a National Arts Journalism fellowship at Columbia University (2000-2001).

Over the years, he has worked as a radio news writer and producer, an actor and a stand-up comedian. He has lectured on writing and journalism at Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Columbia College and Pace University. He has been a frequent radio and television guest in Chicago and New York and has been featured on such stations as WGN-TV, CNN Headline News, Fox News, E! Entertainment Network, and National Public Radio, among others. He was senior editor of Book Magazine, where he worked since the publication’s founding in 1998; the fiction section he edited for the magazine was nominated for a 2003 National Magazine Award.
 

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