Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is a poet and short fiction writer. He has taught courses in creative writing and literature, with a growing emphasis on science fiction, fantasy, horror, the weird, the strange, the experimental, the unclassifiable.

In 2015 his short story "Taylor Swift" won the Barthelme Prize for short fiction, and it has subsequently appeared as one of the most widely studied works of flash fiction in the last 25 years. His story "Goodwill" was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018, and numerous stories of his have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best Small Fictions. In 2020, Nomadic Press published his collection of microfiction, Animal Children.

His books of poetry include Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books, 2007) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press, 2012; reprint, Double Back Books, 2019), as well as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery (2007), Good Morning! (2011) and The Sound of Music (2015). 

He is the author of two libretti: Terrible Things Will Happen But It's Going to Be Okay: A Donner Party Opera with composer Guillermo Galindo, and a children's opera based on the Chinese folktale, The Clever Wife, which was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera for their Opera to Go series. Behm–Steinberg also performs improvised experimental music utilizing vocal samples, digital turntables and effects pedals, working on text/sound art projects with Matt Davignon and others under the bandname Oa and the How Are You Feeling Project. 

He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in creative writing at Stanford University and the recipient of an NEA fellowship. From 2007-2017 he served as Faculty Editor of Eleven Eleven, where he published close to 1200 writers, artists and translations.

He currently lives in Barcelona, where he is the fiction editor of Mercurius.