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David Samuel Levinson
I’m the author of two novels, Tell Me How This Ends Well and Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, and a story collection, Most of Us Are Here Against Our Will. My work has appeared in Hobart, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, StorySouth, The Brooklyn Review, and other literary journals, and has been recognized by The Atlantic Monthly, where a story was selected by Mary Gaitskill, as well as by the Flannery O’Connor Story Prize, where I was a first runner-up.
I’ve received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Jentel, Ledig House, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Santa Fe Arts Institute, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Emory University, where I was a Fiction Fellow from 2013 to 2015. I’ve also served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and as a writer-in-residence at Texas A&M University.
In 2020, I founded The Big Texas Author Talk, a virtual lecture series highlighting contemporary Texas writers. I’m the recipient of a Fulbright-Mach Award from Fulbright Austria and recently returned from a Fulbright Fellowship in Vienna (2024–2025), where I was researching and revising a new novel.
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MORE ABOUT THIS ARTIST
Artist Type: Literary Arts: Author/Writer; Teaching Artist/Instructor
Artist Statement of Work
Tell us about your work (style, approach, philosophy, subject and/or theme):
My work is rooted in an interest in how private lives intersect with public narratives—how people learn to inhabit stories that confer legitimacy, authority, or safety, and how those stories persist even when they rely on silence, distortion, or harm. I’m drawn to characters who are neither innocent nor monstrous but compromised in ways that feel ordinary, intelligible, and hard to dislodge. Rather than pursuing redemption arcs, I’m interested in the quieter mechanisms of survival: accommodation, deflection, and the gradual normalization of ethical failure.
Formally, I tend to work in close psychological realism, but I resist the notion that realism must be transparent or morally clarifying. My fiction often unfolds through layered perspectives, withheld information, and structural repetition, allowing meaning to accumulate rather than announce itself. I’m interested in how narrative authority operates—who gets to speak, who is believed, and how credibility is conferred by institutions as much as by individuals. This has led me to experiment with documents, embedded texts, and shifting points of view, not as postmodern gestures but as ways to dramatize how truth is mediated and controlled.