About

Jason Brown is a fiction and nonfiction writer. He was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies and from the Saltonsall Foundation. He taught for many years in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and now teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is a professor and the Director of the MFA Program. He has published four books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Norton/Random House), Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work (Open City/Grove Atlantic), A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, published in the fall of 2019 as part of the short fiction series by Missouri Review Books, and a novel in stories called Outermark published by Paul Dry Books in 2024. His stories and essays have won several awards and appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, The L.A. Times, The Guardian, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Missouri Review, and other venues. Several of his stories have been performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his collection Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was chosen as a summer reading pick by National Public Radio. Jason’s third book of stories won the Maine Literary Prize for Fiction and an Independent Publisher Book Award. In the fall of 2025 a memoir called Character Witness will be published by the American Lives Series. He was the cowriter with Bill Guttentag and Elaha Mahboob of a feature film called Rule Breakers: The Story of the Afghan Girls Robotics Team, which was released in over 2500 theaters across the country in the spring of 2025 and later on Amazon Prime and AppleTV+. The film has also been distributed throughout Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.

Character Witness, a memoir, out in September 2025:

The book was short-listed for the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, and the first section was in The New Yorker and Best American Essays:

https://www.newyorker.com/.../perso.../the-wrong-jason-brown

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/.../character-witness/

“Jason Brown has a deep, touching, and fresh insight into the abiding attachment and love that family both gives us and subjects us to. Anyone not from a ‘perfect’ family—that is, anyone—will recognize the stumbles and pitfalls and small triumphs that chart the course of family life. The story proceeds relentlessly, but with a light touch even in its darkest moments. It is told in clear, vivid prose, without affectation or false bravado. . . . Character Witness will stand with the best modern American memoirs.”—Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life: A Memoir and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories