Neil Richard Grayson was raised in the woods of upstate New York. Since then, he’s been a schoolteacher, video game designer, rock climbing instructor, bartender, locksmith, and cross-country hitchhiker. He received degrees in English & Education from SUNY Potsdam in 2014, and an MFA from Ohio State in 2019. His fiction/cnf/poetry have appeared in CutBank, HOBART, StoryScape Journal, Fiction Southeast, and others. He’s been awarded fellowships from The Kenyon Review, Community of Writers, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart.

Currently, he’s trying to sell his first book of short stories while teaching at Rochester Institute of Technology and serving as Narrative Editor of the award-winning video game ‘Zakumba’ with Afroduck Studios.

In his head, he’s forever conducting interviews with his favorite thinkers, living or dead, who include: Jaron Lanier, David Graeber, Adam Curtis, Tim Ream, Louise Gluck, Garth Greenwell, Alison Bechdel, P.E. Moskowitz, Gregory Alan Isakov, René Magritte, James Baldwin, Madeline ffitch, Robin Pecknold, Donald Glover, Lucas Pope, Leif Vollebekk, Wes Anderson, Tracy K. Smith, James Longenbach, Carmen Machado, Pat Rothfuss, Eula Biss, Davey Wreden, Noam Chomsky, Lydia Davis, Jared Diamond, Ursula K. Le Guin, Chris Ware, Jim Shepard, George Saunders, and many more.