Career
Currently, he works at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he runs the Writing Studio and Learning Resource Center, which serves students who have disabilities. In 1990, he graduated from the George Washington University with a Bachelor of Arts in economics, and worked for the now-defunct accounting and consulting firm, Arthur Andersen & Company He has held a number of other positions outside academia, serving an association of science museums as editor-in-chief, a major Washington, District of Columbia theatre as an educator, and a national news organization as Capitol Hill Reporter.
He has also done farm work and taught taekwondo.
The web site Rate My Professors recently named him the 2010-2011 "hottest" professor in America, a development that was reported by the Huffington Post, among other media outlets. Gutstein has studied with fiction writer, memoirist, and editor Faye Moskowitz, who he credits as being a mentor and a major early influence.
He later studied with writers Thomas Lux, Richard Tillinghast, Alan Shapiro, and John Russell Brown, among others, and cites such writers from the Washington, District of Columbia poetry scene—Mark Wallace and Rod Smith—as important later influences. Gutstein has cited the poet Paul Celan as being a major source of inspiration, and credits a number of American poets and fiction writers such as Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Lyn Hejinian, Shirley Jackson, Flannery O"Connor, and James Baldwin, as favorites.
Non/fiction (Edge Books: Washington, District of Columbia: 2010) Bloodcoal & Honey (Washington Writers" Publishing House, District of Columbia: 2011).
