Pitt alumnus Elwin Cotman won a Whiting Award for his urban fantasy writing

As early as age 4, Elwin Cotman realized he wanted to be a writer.

Drawn to fantastical stories he saw in video games and read at the library, the Pittsburgh native first typed his own stories on his father’s typewriter and later, his mom’s word processor. From age 8 until high school, he spent summers at Pitt with the Young Writers Institute where, he said, he gained the tools and inspiration to be a writer.

Today, his decadeslong embrace and development of those tools has earned the University of Pittsburgh alumnus a Whiting Award, which recognizes excellence and promise among emerging talent, giving most winners the chance to devote themselves full time to their writing, or to take bold new risks in their work.

He is one of 10 writers who will receive a $50,000 grant on the 40th anniversary of the honors. Past winners include National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes (A&S ’97G) and Hill District native and Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson, whose archive lives in Pitt’s University Library System.

The connection to Wilson comes full circle for Cotman (A&S ’05). At 12, the young writer won a Pittsburgh poetry contest for which Wilson was a judge. Cotman didn’t get to meet Wilson but was buoyed that the playwright appreciated his work.

In selecting Cotman, the Whiting Foundation referenced his work as “exuberant ... illuminating sites of bawdy humor and of horror ... his stories launch into a fabulist stratosphere, but their parabolic trajectory plunges them back into an unsparing reality.”

Cotman said the testimony was based principally on the appeal of his short story collection, “Weird Black Girls,” which mixes fantastical and everyday elements.

“I’m an urban fantasy writer,” he said, “and it’s nice to see this acknowledgement. I see it as an appreciation for my bibliography.”

Cotman is also the author of three other short story collections: “The Jack Daniels Sessions EP,” “Hard Times Blues” and “Dance on Saturday.” He is at work on a debut novel, “The Age of Ignorance,” which chronicles a Black male friendship around the time Oscar Grant was killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer in 2009. The book is scheduled to be published next summer.

His work has appeared in Grist, Electric Lit, Buzzfeed, The Southwestern Review and other publications.

As a teenager, Cotman moved to Montgomery County, Maryland, for high school, where he wrote for the school paper and joined the writing club. He also attended a journalism camp at the University of Missouri.

When he finished, he came to Pitt on scholarship and graduated in three years.

On campus, he was influenced by Bill Kirchner, a Department of English instructor who also happened to be his teacher with the Young Writers Institute; Chuck Kinder, a writing professor and novelist who died in 2019; and retired writing teacher Geeta Kothari. From them, Cotman said, he learned technique, story development and sharpened his tools for the craft.

After earning his bachelor’s from the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, he worked for a while as a high school English teacher in Denver, Colorado, before receiving a contract to publish a book and deciding to pursue his art full time. He now resides in Oakland, California, where he earned an MFA from Mills College at Northeastern University. He is “living the dream,” he said, occasionally teaching and offering workshops, but mostly spending his time writing and reading.

He will use the Whiting grant to finish “The Age of Ignorance” and to support the development of a play and a book of historical fiction that will feature Alexandre Dumas, the author of “The Three Musketeers,” and explore time travel, class, race, celebrity and other issues.

Photography by Beowulf Sheehan