Stuart Dybek - Life and Work

Life and Work

Dybek was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Chicago's Little Village and Pilsen neighborhoods in the 1950s and early 1960s. Dybek graduated from St. Rita of Cascia High School in 1959. Dybek earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and has an MA in literature from Loyola University Chicago.

Dybek's father immigrated to the U.S. from Poland and took the job as a foreman at International Harvester; his mother worked as a truck dispatcher. Dybek has two brothers, Tom a therapist and actor living in New York City and David, who are the inspiration for some of his stories. His son, Nick Dybek, is an author. . He and his wife Caren Dybek, a retired English school teacher, live in Kalamazoo.

He currently teaches at Northwestern University after more than 30 years teaching at Western Michigan University, where he remains an Adjunct Professor of English and a member of the permanent faculty of the renowned Prague Summer Program. He writes about his childhood neighborhoods and the ethnic shift that occurred when they went from being populated with Poles and Czechs toward the primarily Hispanic areas of the city that still remain to this day. He is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. Dybek's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series.