
My father was a Los Angeles deputy sheriff, and throughout most of my youth, I wanted to be a police officer. What, I asked myself, could I credibly write about that was very different from my own experience? One of the main reasons I've always loved reading is that it takes me away from myself and allows me to experience the lives of other people. As is the case in many such programs, there was a good deal of autobiographical introspection in the writing going on around me, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. When I began writing A King of Infinite Space, I was in graduate school earning an MFA in fiction writing. In 2013 the Writer in Residence was Pulitzer Prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri.Amazon Exclusive: Tyler Dilts on A King of Infinite Space With workshops in the major genres (fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction) and literary translation, the Institute is the place for creative writing students to spend serious time on their writing as they get to know the Eternal City.įormer Writers in Residence include poet Mark Strand and novelist Simon Mawer in 2010, poet Charles Wright and novelist Dorothy Allison in 2011, as well as former Poet Laureate Billy Collins and award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates in 2012. Since its founding in 2009, John Cabot University’s Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation has quickly become a thriving community of and for writers in Rome.


His novel A King of Infinite Space (2009), was optioned for a feature film adaptation by TMG productions in 2010 and the poems “Hygiene” and “The Riddle of Steel” were nominated for The Pushcart Prize in 2011.

He teaches in Long Beach, California, where he lives with his wife. His new novel, A Cold and Broken Hallelujah, will be published by Thomas & Mercer in the summer of 2014. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Best American Mystery Stories, and he is the author of A King of Infinite Space and The Pain Scale, the first two novels in the Long Beach Homicide series featuring Detective Danny Beckett. He returned to CSULB for an MA in English Literature and an MFA in Fiction Writing. Tyler Dilts received his BA in Theatre from California State University, Long Beach and performed in more than fifty stage productions before turning his focus to writing. John Cabot University is proud to welcome author Tyler Dilts as this year’s Writer in Residence at the 5th Annual Summer Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation, to be held from May 19th to June 20th.
