Asa Sutton is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts specializing in the surreal and the bittersweet, with stories appearing in Teleport Magazine, Funemployment, Thieving Magpie, and The New Review, as well as in “Already Gone” from Allan Squire Publishing. He received his MFA in Fiction from George Mason University in 2023.

His journey towards writing started three years into his Undergraduate Degree in Physics from Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts; during the week of a severe snowstorm, with classes canceled and nowhere to go, he was consumed by creative impulses and started work on his first book, just because he could. The rest, if anything ever comes of it, will have been history. For nearly ten years now, nearly seven days a week, he has been writing and planning and rewriting and replanning and not outlining nearly enough and editing maybe a little too much. He was the winner of the 2021 Shelley A Marshall Fiction Prize for his short story “Grab Bag” and was the runner-up for the 2021 Mary Roberts Rinehart Award for his short story, “Distance”. He was also the recipient of the 2023 Director’s Fellowship for the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.

Aside from being a writer and editor under the pen-name “Matt Cantor”, he also works as a folklorist, conducting interviews in various communities in nations around the world. His travels have taken him to China, India, Poland, Ireland, and Puerto Rico, as well as across the continental United States.

His study of folklore and mythology heavily affects his work, from modified retellings of myths such as The Epic of Gilgamesh or The Golem of Prague, to more apocryphal projects such as the collection of surrealist Coyote stories for his MFA thesis, to even the “remythologizing” of true historical figures such as Annie Oakley or Vincent van Gogh. His most recent project, “Moonlight in Her Hand”, is a would-be sequel to Miguel de Cervantes’ timeless classic “Don Quixote”, exploring the aftermath of the Woebegotten Knight’s death and the plunging nightmare of the Inquisition upon the Moriscos-- Spanish Moors, largely muslims, whose plight in the early seventeenth century is an eerie parallel to too many events today, from the Uyghurs in China to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and even France. He also produces weekly sci-fi short stories and film-scripts for Safe For Work, an electrical safety company based out of Spain.

Working alongside Polish-based activist group Kolektiv Kefiyah, Asa has produced picture books and other content to help raise awareness of the situation in Gaza, both in recent months and in decades past. Aside from his fiction work, Asa is also a teacher at the Writers Collaborative Learning Center in Reading, Massachusetts, where he leads courses on the Short Story, Children’s Book Writing, and General Craft, as well as open workshops and book-coaching sessions.

In his free time, he enjoys reading both fiction and non-fiction. His favorite authors include Mary Elizabeth Perry, Jennifer Egan, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien, and Juan Rulfo. He enjoys going to movies in theaters or watching them on laptop-screens-- nothing in between.