A Conversation with Rita Bullwinkel

A Conversation with Rita Bullwinkel 
On Writing, Teaching, and Literary Exchange in Germany

American writer and Pulitzer-finalist Rita Bullwinkel (“Headshot”, “Belly up”) joins Goethe-Institut San Francisco director Alexander Behrmann for a conversation about her experiences living and working in Germany.

Bullwinkel, editor of the literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly, was in Germany as the Picador Guest Professor of Literature at Leipzig University in 2024, a prestigious visiting professorship that brings internationally renowned authors to Germany for teaching, public readings, and academic exchange. In this conversation, Bullwinkel reflects on writing abroad, cross-cultural perspectives on literature, and how place, language, and institutional contexts shape creative work. The event offers a rare opportunity to hear an international literary voice in conversation about place, practice, and perspective — and to engage with questions of belonging, mobility, and creativity in a global literary landscape.

About the Speaker

Rita Bullwinkel is the author of two books: Headshot (2024) and Belly Up (2018). Headshot was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. It was also longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. In 2025 Bullwinkel was awarded the Addison M. Metcalf Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which biennially honors a young American writer of great promise. She is also a 2022 recipient of a Whiting Award, the Editor of McSweeney's Quarterly, a Contributing Editor at NOON, the creator of Oral Florist, the former Deputy Editor of The Believer, and the former Assistant Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail. As an Assistant Professor of English at University of San Francisco, and the Picador Guest Professor of American Literature at Leipzig University in Germany, she taught courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world building. She lives in San Francisco.

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