Kirkus Best Book
For Give Them Unquiet Dreams — a starred review and one of the Best Books of 2019.
A Life in Letters
About the Author
Author of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Professor emeritus. Founder of Silver Current Press.
Biography
Three hundred journals — one careful sentence at a time
James Mulhern is a Philadelphia-based novelist, poet, essayist, and professor emeritus of English. His writing in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has appeared in international literary journals and anthologies more than three hundred times. His novels and short story collections — among them Give Them Unquiet Dreams, Molly Bonamici, A Prayer for Home, and Assumptions and Other Stories — have earned favorable critiques from Kirkus Reviews, including a starred review.
Mulhern was awarded a fully paid Creative Writing Fellowship and graduated with “Highest Distinction,” the most prestigious designation granted by the university. In 2015, he was awarded a fully paid writing fellowship to the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. That same year, a story of his was longlisted for the Fish Short Story Prize. In 2017, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for poetry, nominated for Best of the Net, and named a Finalist for the Tuscany Prize in Catholic Fiction. His work received Honorable Mentions for the Short Story America Prize, and two of his novels were Finalists — one a Red Ribbon Winner — for the United Kingdom's Wishing Shelf Book Awards.
His novel Give Them Unquiet Dreams is a Readers' Favorite Book Award winner and was named one of the Best Books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, which awarded it a starred review. Forthcoming titles include the story collection The Weight of Small Mercies, the story collection Mia Bambina and Other Stories, and the second edition of his textbook How to Analyze Literature.
He is the founder of Silver Current Press, a Philadelphia imprint devoted to literary fiction, poetry, and the art of the well-made book. After three decades teaching creative writing, literary analysis, and the craft of the short story to undergraduate and graduate students, he writes and publishes full time as professor emeritus.
Life & Background
From Boston to Oxford to Philadelphia
James Mulhern was raised in a Boston Irish Catholic family whose rhythms — the church bells and the family kitchen, the rosary and the radio, the silences kept and the secrets passed down — supply the moral atmosphere of his fiction. The 1970s Boston of Give Them Unquiet Dreams is not a tourist's Boston; it is the city as it was lived by working-class families on tree-lined streets where the past was always close enough to touch.
He was awarded a fully paid Creative Writing Fellowship and graduated with “Highest Distinction,” the most prestigious designation granted by the university. He then entered a teaching life that would last more than three decades — working principally with inner-city high school and college students, many of them children of immigrants and immigrants themselves. Their lives, voices, and resilience would, over time, enter his fiction as deeply as his Irish-Catholic inheritance ever had.
"As a teacher of American literature," he has written, "I want my students to use the literature as a way to make connections and find meaning. Explore the circumference of your life. Write about your experience. Celebrate yourself." The literature he taught — Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Hughes, O'Connor, Joyce — is the same literature that quietly informs his prose: a faith that the well-made sentence is a moral instrument, that the right line of poetry can hold a life.
In 2015, Mulhern was awarded a fully paid Creative Writing Fellowship to the University of Oxford. He now makes his permanent home in Philadelphia — a city he has come to love for its history, its museums, its green space, and, most of all, its character. Having spent time in cities around the world, he finds a particular gratitude in living among Philadelphians, whose everyday warmth keeps faith with the city’s old name. In Philadelphia he founded Silver Current Press, an independent imprint devoted to literary fiction, poetry, and craft writing — including his own work and that of writers whose voices he wishes to bring to a wider readership.
He is now professor emeritus, dividing his days between writing, editing, and the work of Silver Current Press — a small literary press devoted to fiction, poetry, and the craft of writing well. He continues to mentor writers, teach the occasional seminar, and read widely in the tradition that shaped him. The sentences continue.
Awards & Distinctions
A record of recognition
Kirkus Starred Review
Awarded only to books of remarkable merit. "A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit."
Pushcart Prize Nominee
Nominated for one of the most prestigious honors in American small-press literature.
Oxford University Fellowship
A fully paid Creative Writing Fellowship to the University of Oxford.
Fully Paid Creative Writing Fellowship
Awarded “Highest Distinction,” the most prestigious designation granted by the university.
Aesthetica Creative Writing Award
Shortlisted for the United Kingdom's Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for poetry.
Best of the Net Nomination
Nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology in poetry.
Fish Short Story Prize
Longlisted for the international Fish Short Story Prize.
Short Story America Prize
Honorable Mentions for the Short Story America Prize.
Tuscany Prize Finalist
Finalist for the Tuscany Prize in Catholic Fiction.
Wishing Shelf Book Awards
Two novels named Finalists, with a Red Ribbon Winner / highly recommended distinction.
Readers' Favorite Award Winner
Multiple novels recognized as winners by the Readers' Favorite Book Awards.
In the Classroom
Teaching the craft
Three decades of guiding writers at every stage — from first-year undergraduates discovering the short story to graduate students sharpening voice and structure.
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The Art of Telling
A study of narrative craft — voice, point of view, scene construction, and the architecture of meaning across the modern short story.
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Writing Workshop
An advanced seminar in fiction and poetry. Close reading, close revision, and the cultivation of a writer's working life.
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Literature Surveys
Courses in modern and contemporary literature — exploring how the great writers of the past century shaped the sentences we still write today.
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Independent Mentorship
One-on-one work with serious writers preparing manuscripts, applying to MFA programs, or sending work to journals and contests.
A Working Credo
"Literature is one of the great moral instruments of the human race. The work is to keep faith with it — sentence by sentence."
— James Mulhern