Stuart Dybek is the author of three books of fiction, the novel-in-stories I Sailed With Magellan (FSG), The Coast of Chicago (Picador), Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (University of Chicago Press), and two colletions of poems: Streets in Their Own Ink (FSG) and Brass Knuckles (Carnegie-Mellon). A chapbook of short fiction and prose poems, The Story of Mist (State Street Press) appeared in 1993. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have been published in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, DoubleTake, and Poetry. His work has also been translated into several languages and is frequently anthologized.

In 2004, his collection, The Coast of Chicago, was the One Book, One Chicago selectionOne Book is an ambitious program in which the selected book is read in libraries and high schools throughout the city. Also in 2004, I Sailed With Magellan was awarded the prize in adult fiction from the Society of Midland Authors. The book was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the 26 Most Notable Books of 2005. One of the stories, Breasts, appears in the 2004 Best American Short Stories.

Other awards include a 1998 Lannan Award, the 1995 PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize for distinctive achievement in the short story; and Academy Institute Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994; a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, and a Whiting Writers Award. His work has received four O. Henry Prizes, including an O. Henry first prize for his story Hot Ice. His work has appeared in both Best American Fiction and Best American Poetry. His short story Blight was awarded a Nelson Algren Prize and his collection, Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, received the 1981 Prize for Fiction from the Society of Midland Authors, a Special Citation from the PEN/Hemingway Prize Committee, and the Cliff Dwellers Award from the Friends of Literature. Other awards include a Michigan Arts Award, grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes.

Stuart's MFA is from the University of Iowa where he took workshops in both fiction and poetry. At Iowa, he won the Academy of American Poets Contest and was awarded a Teaching/Writing Fellowship. He also has an MA in Literature from Loyola University in Chicago.

He is currently a professor of English at Western Michigan University and a member of the permanent faculty at the Prague Summer Program. At WMU, he received the Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Princeton, the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, the University of California at Irvine, Northwestern, and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. He has read and lectured at numerous universities, libraries, and literary associations. He has served as a guest editor and a contributing editor for several magazines and presses, and he serves regularly as a judge for various literary awards.