Joseph Bates is the author of The Strikeout Artist (BlazeVOX 2022), Tomorrowland: Stories (Curbside Splendor 2013) and Writing Your Novel from Start to Finish (Writer's Digest 2015). His short fiction has appeared in such journals as The Rumpus, New Ohio Review, Identity Theory, South Carolina Review, Fresh Boiled Peanuts, and InDigest Magazine. He teaches in the creative writing program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio
Bates will read from his new novel, The Strikeout Artist. Lee Upton, author of Visitations and The Tao of Humiliation reviewed Bates's novel, saying, "You don’t have to know anything about baseball to fall in love with this astonishing novel in which Franz Kafka performs as an unlikely star pitcher. Delighted by Bates’s kinetic, daring plot, you’ll have to stop often to laugh, then in the next moment you’ll be drawn up short in wonder by the surprisingly tender heart of this novel. Bates writes about people lurching in despair and yet redeemed by loss. A novel about failure that’s a marvelously wrought success."
