Kevin Moffett grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, studied at the University of Florida, and took his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He now teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia. Before that he edited and wrote for Funworld, the trade magazine of the amusement park industry, a job he wrote about in The Believer.
His early reputation rested on short stories, which appeared in McSweeney's, Tin House and The Best American Short Stories. They tend to be funny and emotionally exposed at once, and often concern people trying to talk to one another across some gap. He is also interested in formal play, particularly oral history. With Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby he wrote The Silent History, a fictional oral history first released as a serialized app for phones and later published as a book by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2014. He has also written scripted podcasts for Gimlet Media, including Sandra.
His first collection, Permanent Visitors, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, judged by George Saunders. A second collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, followed in 2012. His honors include a National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, a Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. His debut novel, Only Son, came out from McSweeney's on November 4, 2025, and was longlisted for that year's National Book Award for Fiction.
Start with Only Son. It moves from a boy in 1980s Florida, shadowed by his father's death, to a grown man in suburban California who is trying to reach his own son. It is short and compact, and it shows his humor and his feeling for family. If you then want his short fiction, try Permanent Visitors.
