Background
Nick Flynn was raised by his mother in Scituate, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Since Nick was six months old, he had never met his father throughout his childhood and teenage years. As a child, he was discouraged to follow a writing career because his father identified himself as a writer to his mother when they metropolitan
Career
His most recent publication is The Reenactments, which chronicles Flynn"s experience during the making of Being Flynn, a film based on his acclaimed 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Nick claimed a reason she left him was for his “delusion of greatness and identifying it very directly with being an artist.” The stigma of being a writer stuck with Nick. He became an electrician after high school.
When he was 22 years old, his mother committed suicide, and Nick left home soon after.
At 27, Flynn was unexpectedly reunited with his father at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston, when his then-homeless father showed up as a "guest." He examined his relationship with his father, as well as the suicide of his mother, in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Flynn explored his decision to have a child in his second memoir,The Ticking Is The Bomb.
Following its publication, he wrote a book of poetry,The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, which continued on similar themes. The Reenactments is the final book in Flynn"s trilogy of memoirs.
Flynn"s initial focus was on poetry, and he held a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, before moving to New York to pursue his Master of Arts in Poetry at New York University.
He currently teaches Creative at the University of Houston. Flynn"s poems, essays, and non-fiction have been featured in The New Yorker, Paris Review, National Public Radio"s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review, and have been translated into 14 languages. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A (West West Norton & Company, 2004) The Ticking Is the Bomb: A (West West Norton & Company, 2010) The Reenactments: A (West West Norton & Company, 2013).
Membership
He was a member of Columbia University"s Project, in which he served as an educator and consultant in New York public schools.