Steven Hayward

Steven Hayward was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, where he attended the University of Toronto and York University. Before coming to John Carroll and Ohio, he was living in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and an Associate Fellow at the at Rutgers University’s Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture (CCACC). In addition to his creative work, Hayward has also published on film, literary theory, Renaissance drama, and Canadian literature.

Hayward’s first book, “Buddha Stevens and Other Stories,” won the 2001 Upper Canada Writer’s Craft Award; prior to that, the individual stories that would eventually make up this collection were nominated for the Pushcart and Journey prizes, won awards at the University of Greensboro, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Toronto, and had appeared in The Iowa Review, Writ, Exile, The Southwestern Review, Fiddlehead, and Canadian Fiction Magazine.

Hayward’s most recent novel, “The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke” (Knopf Canada, 2005), is a historical novel set in Depression-era Toronto which begins when seventeen-year-old Lucio Burke knocks a mysterious bird out of the Toronto sky with a baseball. With that single, perfect throw, Lucio finds himself pulled into History—into contact with a radicalized labor movement, anti-Semitism, Mussolini’s fascism, and onto the mound as the pitcher in the most infamous baseball game in Canadian history. On hand to observe this incredible chain of events is Ruthie the Commie, as she’s called by everyone. Gorgeous, fearsome, committed, and convinced that love and social justice are just around the corner, Ruthie seduces (and falls in love with) Lucio at the same time as Dubie, Lucio’s best friend and next door neighbor maims and declares his love for Ruthie. What follows is a story about love, friendship, the nature of the miraculous, and a quest to change the world—a story driven by the question of what might have been possible in the nineteen thirties.

Selected to be part of Knopf Canada’s esteemed New Face of Fiction program, “The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke” went on to be shortlisted for a 2006 Northern Ohio Live Award of Achievement, and won Italy’s Premio Grinzane Cavour prize for best first novel. Established in 1982, the Grinzane Cavour Prize is one of the most famous Italian awards for fiction. Among its recipients are some of the most important writers in the world, including Günter Grass, M. Coetzee and V.S. Naipaul.

An Assistant Professor, Hayward teaches introductory, advanced, and multi-genre workshops where he works to show students a “craft-centered approach” and demonstrates that creative writing classes require a different kind of attention than ordinary English courses. He is also the Director of “Red, White and Read: Canadian Writers Come to Cleveland,” a groundbreaking reading series that has brought many of Canada’s pre-eminent writers to Cleveland, including Miriam Toews, Ann-Marie Macdonald, Tim Taylor, Nino Ricci, and Paul Quarrington.

He is at present at work on a second novel and continues to write short fiction; his most recent publication is a long story about Ohio entitled “Bee Girl” in the current issue of The Malahat Review.

Steven Hayward can be emailed at shayward@jcu.edu.