Tim Bascom

Tim Bascom is author of a new coming-of-age memoir, Running to the Fire (University of Iowa Press, April, 2015), about his experience as the son of missionaries stationed in Ethiopia during a Marxist Revolution. His earlier memoir Chameleon Days: An American Boyhood in Ethiopia won the Bakeless Literary Prize in Nonfiction sponsored by Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which led to to publication by Houghton Mifflin.

Bascom spent much of his childhood in Ethiopia—with stints in Kenya and Sudan—where his father was a medical missionary. He also spent six months in the Philippines on a college internship, and later traveled to over 25 countries while working for a non-profit that provided training for writers and editors in Africa and Asia. He is the author of a collection of essays (The Comfort Trap) and a novel (Squatters’ Rites), and his writing has won editor’s prizes at The Missouri Review and Florida Review, being selected for Best American Travel Writing and Best Creative Nonfiction. He also has fiction and memoir pieces that have appeared in the anthologies Law and Disorder and Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie.

Bascom received his MFA degree from the University of Iowa, and he is the Director of Creative Writing at Waldorf College in northern Iowa. He teaches at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival and often visits colleges, libraries, and book clubs as a guest author.