Cutter Wood is the author of the book Love and Death in the Sunshine State, which Leslie Jamison called a “gripping exploration of an island murder and a heartland love,” and the forthcoming Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies' Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations. The recipient of a 2018 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a former Visiting Scholar at the University of Louisville, Cutter has published essays in Harper’s and other magazines. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

“The NWP taught me about the history of the essay, it offered me time to work, and it gave me the opportunity to teach writing courses of my own. Each of those experiences was fundamentally important to my development as a writer. Much harder to describe, though, is the effect of living and teaching and studying and working in the middle of a vast and largely empty plain with a few dozen other writers. In that small city, separated from our previous lives by miles of corn and by our decision to try to take writing seriously, we were extravagant with our time and thoughts, and when I think back on those years they seem to melt into a single unending conversation, drifting fluidly from one topic to the next—cheeseburgers, Natalia Ginzburg, roller skates, brands of pens and typewriters, Orwell in the Hebrides, the work of a metaphor, how to hold a croquet mallet, kinds of snow, karaoke, undergraduate writing assignments, the ineffable, the Middle Ages, the correct spelling of cantaloupe—a conversation like a party, some people arriving, others leaving, some falling asleep, others waking, a few stepping out into the backyard to smoke or look at the moon or plan a class on Hazlitt, but always the thread of talk went on and on, through the night, through the day, straight through for three years, a ridiculous conversation, equal parts silly and profound, and full of younger fools, whom I miss often.”