Jonathan Blum

Jonathan Blum (writer, born 1967) is an American writer.

Blum was born into a Jewish family in Philadelphia, grew up in Miami, Florida and currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

He graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Since then, he has taught fiction writing at Drew University and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and has published short stories, essays, poems, and a novella.

The personal essay "May Be Habit Forming" was a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2000, edited by Robert Atwan and Alan Lightman.

In November 2013, Last Word was an Editor's Pick at NewPages.

Stephen Lovely in The Iowa Review called Last Word "a masterful finesse of unreliable narration."

Blum's short fiction has appeared in Angels Flight • literary west, The Carolina Quarterly, Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, New York Stories, Northwest Review, Playboy, Shanxi Literature, Sonora Review and Zaum.

Blum has won the Michener-Copernicus Society of America literary award, the Playboy Magazine College Fiction Contest, a Helene Wurlitzer Foundation fellowship, and a Hawthornden fellowship.

Blum is the author of the short story collection The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press, 2019), named one of the best short story collections of 2019 by Electric Literature and a novella, Last Word (Rescue Press, 2013), named one of the year's "best books to give as gifts" by Iowa Public Radio.

Iowa Public Radio included The Usual Uncertainties on their list of best new fiction books for winter 2019.