Ira Sukrungruang

Ira Sukrungruang
Assistant Professor

Contact

Office: CPR 332
Phone: 813/974-9527
Email:

Links

• Curriculum Vitae
• Website

Bio

Ira Sukrungruang is a Chicago born Thai-American. He is the co-editor of What Are You Looking At: The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology, both published by Harcourt Brace. What Are You Looking At? is the first book that looks at the fat experience through the lens of literature, and has received positive reviews in the Library Journal, Boston Globe, Book Magazine and other periodicals. The book was reprinted in the UK in 2005. Scoot Over, Skinny includes essays by Lori Gottlieb, Stephen Kuusisto, Pam Houston, David Sedaris, and many others. The anthology opens up the discussion about the “fat experience.” These essays represent an amalgam of voices in our country.

Ira has published his essays, poems, and short stories in many literary journals and anthologies, including Creative Nonfiction, the Bellingham Review, North American Review, Isotope, Crab Orchard Review, Post Road, and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing. He has received the New York Foundation for the Arts Nonfiction Fellowship, The Just Desserts Fiction Prize, and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and received support from the Blue Mountain Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow.

Currently, he is working on several projects: a collection of essays entitled Thai Boy; a memoir about Thailand entitled The Talk of Butterflies; a collection of short stories entitled The Man With the Buddha Heads; and a collection of poetry entitled In Thailand It Is Night.

Current Courses