Press Kit

MINI BIO

Tommy Dean is a literary agent with Talcott Notch, the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). This Fear We Harbor, a flash collection, is forthcoming in March 2027 (Unsolicited Press). He lives in Indiana, and edits Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. His writing can be found in Monkeybicycle, Moon City Review, Pithead Chapel, Harpur Palate, and many other litmags.   He has taught writing workshops for the Gotham Writers Workshop, The Writers Center, and The Writers Workshop. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on IG @tommydeantommydean. 

LONG BIO

Tommy Dean is a writer, editor, literary agent, and teacher whose work has become deeply connected to the contemporary flash-fiction community. He is the author of the flash fiction collection Hollows and the chapbooks Special Like the People on TV and Covenants. His fiction has appeared in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, and 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Monkeybicycle, Moon City Review, Pithead Chapel, Harpur Palate, and numerous other literary magazines.

Dean serves as editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine and works as a literary agent at Talcott Notch, where he represents fiction including mystery, suspense, thrillers, crime, and upmarket fiction. His experience as a writer, editor, and agent gives him a rare perspective on how stories work and how writers develop lasting literary careers.

A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, Dean has taught writing workshops for Gotham Writers Workshop, The Writers Center, The Writers Workshop, Barrelhouse’s Conversations and Connections conference, and other writing organizations and conferences. His interviews and literary conversations have appeared in The Rumpus, CRAFT Literary, New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere.

He lives in Indiana. This Fear We Harbor, his newest flash fiction collection, will be published by Unsolicited Press in March 2027.

Buy now!

In these 45 flash fictions, you’ll find the last two people on Earth, wondering if love or ramen will keep them both alive; two brothers racing the clock of the millennium, as they consider their fear for the future; a son trying to convince his father to abandon a decrepit house while the father demands to die among his things. These stories thrum with the electricity of wonder, challenged by the open wounds of love for parents, of desire to strike out in a world without reason or guidepost, threatening to harden players into their desperate natures. Dean’s clear and urgent prose unites reader and character as they travel down dark and shaky paths toward the fading light.

Brutal and gorgeous, Tommy Dean’s chapbook Covenants contemplates the end of the world in various scenarios—floods, droughts, imminent divorce. These stories are tiny, piercing thorns. Even as everything is breaking, characters admire the beauty in the wreckage: “she loved the way the dying sunlight filtered through the spiderwebbed cracks.” Covenants both mourns and celebrates the illumination that forces through those cracks.

―Kim Magowan, author of Undoing