Press Kit

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Tommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the Editor at Fractured Lit. He has been previously published in The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, and Pithead Chapel. His stories have been included in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. Find him @TommyDeanWriter.

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Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). Hollows, A collection of flash fiction is forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. He lives in Indiana where he currently is the Editor at Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. A graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program, he is currently working on a novel. A recipient of the 2019 Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction, his writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020, Best Small Fiction 2019, Monkeybicycle, and the Atticus Review. He taught writing workshops for the Gotham Writers Workshop, the Barrelhouse Conversations and Connections conference, and The Writers Workshop. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.

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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