Charles Baxter

Charles Morley Baxter (born May 13, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Baxter was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to John and Mary Barber (Eaton) Baxter. He graduated from Macalester College in Saint Paul in 1969. In 1974 he received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo with a thesis on Djuna Barnes, Malcolm Lowry, and Nathanael West.Baxter taught high school in Pinconning, Michigan for a year before beginning his university teaching career at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where for many years he directed the Creative Writing MFA program. He was a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa and at Stanford. He taught at the University of Minnesota and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He retired in 2020.

He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985. He received the PEN/Malamud Award in 2021 for Excellence in the Short Story.He married teacher Martha Ann Hauser in 1976, and has a son, Daniel. Baxter and Hauser eventually separated.