Life and work
Winer studied painting at the University of California, Los Angeles, and at the California Institute of the Arts. He had a number of solo and group shows in Los Angeles and New York City, and wrote criticism and reviews for Art Issues before beginning his literary career. In 2000, he received an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine, and, two years later, published his first novel, The Color Midnight Made, an acclaimed national bestseller.
In 2004, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction, and a literary residency at Literar-Mechana in Vienna, Austria, where he started research for his second novel, The Marriage Artist, published in 2010 by Henry Holt and Co., and republished in a hardcover edition by Picador in 2011.
Winer has conducted public conversations with writers such as Rachel Cusk, Colm Toibin, Adam Zagajewski, Geoff Dyer, Akwaeke Emezi, Jane Smiley, Will Self, and Juan Felipe Herrera. He has given talks on artists such as Marsden Hartley, Ellsworth Kelly, and Martin Johnson Heade, and on writers such as Fernando Pessoa and Emil Cioran. His philosophical work is focused on Friedrich Nietzsche. With Nietzsche scholar Maudemarie Clark, he is writing a book on Nietzsche for Oxford University Press.
He has also written extensively for art catalogs and national and international art publications such as BLAU INTERNATIONAL or Gagosian Quarterly. Some of the artists he has written about include Vija Celmins, Eric Fischl, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Harold Ancart, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Glenn Brown.
Winer is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
