John Michael Cummings

I’m the author of more than a hundred published short stories. Publication credits include North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Iowa Review. “The Scratchboard Project” received honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2007. Twice my short fiction has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

In 2008, after many years of effort, I published my first novel, The Night I Freed John Brown (Philomel Books, Penguin Group). It was the 2009 winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young People (Grades 7-12) and was recommended by USA TODAY for Black History Month. Rave reviews appeared in Kirkus Reviews, The Boston Globe, The Buffalo News, and BookPage, along with five award-winning literary magazines, including Mid-American Review, Black Warrior Review, and The Texas Review. It was blurbed by Newbery Honor Recipient Ruth White, North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell, and Pushcart Prize winner R.T. Smith.

My second book, Ugly To Start With (West Virginia University Press) is due out this October. Here’s some early praise.

“A powerful read that lingered with me for days.”
–Blake Nelson, author of Recovery Road, Destroy All Cars, Paranoid Park, RockStar SuperStar, and Girl

“A balance of grit and wonder.”
–Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever and Break the Skin

“A baker’s dozen of stories full of the warmth, innocence, and holy terrors of childhood.”
–Peter Selgin, author of Drowning Lessons

“Charged with the class and racial tensions encoded in the DNA of the United States. ”
–Brendan Short, author of Dream City

“A moving, lovelycollection that stokes and carries forward the hot flames of West Virginia literature.”
–Greg Downs, author of Spit Baths and Declarations of Dependence

“John Michael Cummings is a master craftsman.”
–Benjamin Hedin is the editor of Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader and is currently finishing work on a novel.

“This a lovely, funny, melancholy, and important collection of coming-of-age stories.”
–Maxine Chernoff, author of A Boy in Winter

“Like Faulkner, Cummings knows the strong undertow that blood exerts on ambition and self-preservation.”
–Charlotte Holmes teaches at Penn State University. Her stories have appeared in many journals including Epoch, New Letters, Story, and The New Yorker.

“In spare, sparkling, deeply intelligent and often heartbreakingly funny prose, Cummings asks us to consider who we used to be as a nation, who and what we have since become, what we jettisoned along the way, and what we might yet salvage from our lovely and unlovely past.”
–Eileen Pollack, Director, MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan and author of The Rabbi in the Attic, In the Mouth, and Paradise

“Subtle yet lucid accounts of a raw upbringing in West Virginia.”
–Carolyn Osborn, author of Warriors and Maidens and Uncertain Ground

“Like Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, John Michael Cummings’ teenage narrator reveals the troubled and tender and tough heart of a place both split and knit by class, race and family.”
–Wayne Karlin, author of Wandering Souls and Prisoners

“This charming collection of linked stories has pitch-perfect West Virginia voices.”
–Enid Shomer, author of Tourist Season, Florida’s 2008 Gold Medal in Fiction.

“Cummings’ stories shine a penetrating light into human experience.”
–Meredith Sue Willis, author of Oradell at Sea

“In Ugly to Start With, Cummings portrays with keen accuracy the small struggles for power that constitute little civil wars between people.”
–Edwina Pendarvis is book review editor for Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine and author of Between Two Worlds: A Biography of Pearl S. Buck

“This collection has defined West Virginia’s eastern panhandle as Cummings country, as much as the Salinas Valley belongs to Steinbeck or working-class Albany belongs to William Kennedy.”
–Jacob M. Appel, author of “Dyads” and “The Vermin Episode”