About

Elwin Cotman is a storyteller from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of five books: the poetry collection The Wizard’s Homecoming, and the short story collections The Jack Daniels Sessions EP, Hard Times Blues, Dance on Saturday, and Weird Black Girls. His debut novel The Age of Ignorance will be published by Scribner in 2026.

Cotman’s work has appeared in Grist, Electric Lit, Buzzfeed, The Southwestern Review, and The Offing, among others (see publications). He has worked as a video game consultant and writer for Square Enix. He is a winner of the 2025 Whiting Award in Fiction. He writes this and that on his Substack.

Elwin Cotman creates exuberant fictional landscapes lit by philosophical lightning, illuminating sites of bawdy humor and of horror. His stories launch into a fabulist stratosphere, but their parabolic trajectory plunges them back into an unsparing reality. Thus they make the everyday strange and bring the strange within reach. A Cotman character is instantly recognizable for their wry, earthy lyricism; his work is alive with questions, tense with longing and possibility.

-Whiting Award citation

Literary Agent:

Mark Gottlieb

mgottlieb@tridentmediagroup.com

Marketing at Scribner:

Mark Galarrita

mark.galarrita@simonandschuster.com