Gregory Spatz

Born in New York City, Spatz holds degrees from Haverford College, University of New Hampshire, and The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He now lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches in the MFA program at the Inland Northwest Center for Writers, Eastern Washington University. Spatz spent his youth in New England, mostly in the Berkshires.

He begged for violin lessons and began playing at six years old; he still plays fiddle professionally with John Reischman and the Jaybirds, a bluegrass band, and bouzouki with the old-time world-folk stringband Mighty Squirrel. "When I was five or six, my parents were reading aloud to me from J.R.R. Tolkien," Spatz says. "Pretty much simultaneously, I heard the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I could not believe or understand how these two artistic expressions weren't one and same thing--the lyrical, soaring violin and the narrative. Ever since, music and stories have been intertwined and at the center of my life." His playing can be heard on all of the Jaybirds recordings, as well as Mighty Squirrel and he has a new solo CD just out, Fiddler's Dream.

He is the author of novels Fiddler's Dream and No One But Us, as well as a short story collection, Wonderful Tricks. His short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines, and he has published numerous book and music reviews for The Oxford American.

When not on the road with the Jaybirds or Mighty Squirrel, or busy at work teaching and writing, he enjoys playing music with his wife, Caridwen, also a fiddler, being a step-dad to her two sons Tal and Angus, and building a writing studio of rice hulls, barbed wire, recycled wine bottles, adobe and cement in the back yard. Never a dull moment!