Reif Larsen

writer, filmmaker

Reif Larsen is a filmmaker, teacher, and writer. His first novel is *The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet*, which follows the charming adventures, through life's mysteries great and small, of T.S. Spivet, a 12-year-old genius mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. Reif Larson has shot a number of documentaries in the US, UK, and Sub-Saharan Africa about inner-city students working in the arts. He has taught creative writing workshops all over the country, including a Mormon ranch in Idaho's Snake River Valley. Larsen went to Brown University and majored in Educational Studies. While at Brown, he spent most of a year teaching at Maru-a-Pula school in Gaborone, Botswana, and he remains on their American board of trustees. In 2008, he organized a US tour of the Maru-a-Pula school marimba band in order to raise funds for AIDS orphan scholarships. After college, Larsen worked for a year in several schools across England as part of an international linguistic research team, measuring the effect that artists, working in long term partnership with a school, had on a student's language. Larsen currently teaches at Columbia University, where he completed his MFA in fiction. He lives in Brooklyn. Photo courtesy of Elliott Holt.