Raymond Obstfeld

Raymond Obstfeld (born January 22, 1952) is an American writer of poetry, non-fiction, fiction, and screenplays as well as a professor of English at Orange Coast College.

He was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania on January 22, 1952 and graduated from Loyalsock High School in 1969. His parents and older brother, Roland (b. 1947), were immigrants from Germany. His parents owned and operated Obstfeld's Jewish Delicatessen, which was the target of various hate crimes during Obstfeld's youth, from Nazi swastikas painted on the doors to arson, which gutted the building. His parents rebuilt the store, but these events informed Obstfeld’s later political activism as well as his writing.

After a year at the local Lycoming College, Obstfeld attended an experimental college in Redlands, California, (now the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands) from which he graduated in 1972. He then attended the University of California, Santa Barbara for a year, but left to pursue his writing. After a year living in San Francisco working odd jobs, he finished his first novel and got an agent.

In 1974, he returned to graduate school at the University of California, Davis, where he studied poetry under the famed poet Karl Shapiro. After graduating in 1976, he began teaching English at Orange Coast College at the age of 24, where he still teaches today. He has said that when he started teaching he intended to quit as soon as his writing career took off. However, in his first year of teaching he sold his first book of poetry as well as his first novel, with a contract for three additional novels. He decided that he actually loved teaching more than writing and couldn’t give it up.

Writing career
Obstfeld has authored or co-authored nearly 50 books. Since 2007, he has been co-author to eight books with NBA basketball legend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Obstfeld has twice been nominated for the NAACP Image Award, having won once. He has also been nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Dead Heat. His young adult novel, The Joker and the Thief, won a Delacorte Young Adult Award.

Early in his writing career, Obstfeld wrote under several pseudonyms (Pike Bishop, Carl Stevens, Jason Frost) because he wrote different genres. After writing over a dozen thrillers, Westerns, and occult novels, he decided to return to mainstream literary fiction that he had written in graduate school. Because he’d already achieved some fame as a mystery writer, he decided to write his new novel under the name Laramie Dunaway. The novel, Hungry Women, was written from the points of view of four women friends. It was published by Warner Books without anyone at the publishing house knowing Obstfeld was a man. The novel went on to great success, being published internationally. Laramie Dunaway published two more novels before informing Warner of his gender. The publisher decided to publish Obstfeld’s next novel, Earth Angel, under his real name.

As a screenwriter, Obstfeld has written and sold numerous scripts that have been optioned or sold, though only one has actually been filmed, Whatever It Takes (1999) starring Don “The Dragon” Wilson.

In 2018, he joined the writing staff for the upcoming Veronica Mars revival series.

Awards
1992 - Delacorte Young Adult Novel Award for Joker and the Thief

1981 - Nominated for Edgar Allan Poe Award for Dead Heat

2013 - NAACP Image Award for What Color Is My World

2017 - Nominated NAACP Image Award for Becoming Kareem

Personal life
Obstfeld married Loretta Obstfeld, an award-winning poet and English professor at Orange Coast College, in 1990. They have two children: Max (b. 1999) and Harper (b. 2002).