Rusty Barnes grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in over a hundred fifty journals and anthologies. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a literary journal which has been featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. Sunnyoutside Press published a collection of his flash fiction, Breaking it Down, in November 2007. He is a nationally recognized and oft-solicited authority on flash fiction under all its various names and permutations, and serves on writing conference faculties and panels throughout the country, including recently with Associated Writing Programs, Somerville News Writers Festival, Writers@Work, The Parlor, and Grub Street Writers, as well as their annual Muse & Marketplace conference. He taught composition, fiction writing, and literature for over ten years in New England universities such as Emerson College and Northeastern University. His stories have been translated into Finnish, French, Polish, and Russian. His collection of traditional fiction, The Ground Always Gives Way, will be published by Sunnyoutside Press in early 2011. His recently completed novel, tentatively titled “Three of a Kind,” is about northern Appalachia, family and community dynamics, sex, drugs, and not so much rock ‘n’ roll.
If you want to know more, friend him on Facebook, or check through his recent interviews. If you’d like to read his poetry and get poetry-related news, visit Live Nude Poems. If you’re really hurting to know more, you can join his mailing list, and he’ll mail you updates when something interesting happens in his life. In other words, not often. Addresses and information will not be sold, given away, nor beaten from the proprietor’s brain by large men with shillelaghs.

