Justin St Germain

Justin St. Germain teaches creative nonfiction and true crime courses at OSU.

He is the author of the internationally acclaimed memoir Son of a Gun (Random House, 2013), which The New York Times Book Review called "spectacular" and NPR called "gritty and luminous." It was a New York Times Editor's Choice, was named a best book of the year by Amazon, Library Journal, Salon, Publisher's Weekly, Bookpage, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Pima County Public Library, and won the 2014 Barnes and Noble Discover Prize in Nonfiction. His most recent book, Bookmarked: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (IG Publishing, 2021), traces the profound cultural influence of Capote's foundational true crime text.

His work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Yaddo, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Tin House, New England Review, Lit Hub, ZYZZYVA, DIAGRAM, The Best True Crime Stories, Best of the West, and many other journals, magazines, and anthologies.

He's a first-generation college student who attended Arizona public schools, various community colleges, and the University of Arizona, where he received his BA and MFA.