“With language both elegiac and irreverent, Otte explores characters trapped in liminal spaces between reality and delusion, oblivion and grief, cruelty and devotion, but within the debris something beautiful persists.”
- Salar Abdoh, Author of A Nearby Country Called Love
Nick Otte’s writing has appeared in Boulevard, Electric Literature, Arts & Letters, The Baltimore Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Words Without Borders and elsewhere.
He was named runner-up in Boulevard’s 2023 Emerging Writer contest, was the recipient of the 2021 Jerome Lowell DeJure Prize in Creative Writing, and was the winner of the Winter 2020 Fiction Contest at Causeway Lit. He received a residency from Jentel Arts and has attended the One Story Writer’s Conference.
He earned an MFA from The City College of New York and has taught writing at CCNY, Lehman College, and Baruch College. He was a Teacher of Special Programs with the Bay Area Writing Project at UC Berkeley focusing in genre studies, and designs original lesson plans and curriculum material that seeks to illuminate both the value and joy of thoughtful, original, human writing.
He is currently working on his debut novel (the opening chapter of which was longlisted for both Uncharted and Santa Fe Writers Project prizes) and seeking representation and publication for his debut collection of short stories.
Contact him at: nick.otte@gmail.com