William Luvaas

William Luvaas (b. 1945, Oregon) is an American author and educator.

Career
In 1965, Luvaas was one of two AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers in Alabama, working with black sharecroppers and domestic workers in a government-funded program "designed to provide needed resources to nonprofit organizations and public agencies to increase their capacity to lift communities out of poverty."

Luvaas is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. He developed the first high school-level fiction writing course in New York. As fiction coordinator for New York State Poets in Public Service and New York State Poets in Schools, he was writer-in-residence for schools, hospitals and juvenile detention facilities.

In 2006 he received the National Endowments for the Arts fellowship for prose, awarded while he was teaching at San Diego State University.

His short story collection Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil) was awarded Huffington Post’s 2013 Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. In addition to Ashes Rain Down, he has written four other published novels, The Seductions of Natalie Bach (Little, Brown), Going Under  (Putnam), Beneath The Coyote Hills (Spuyten Duyvil), and Welcome To Saint Angel (Anaphora Literary Press), plus a short story collection: A Working Man’s Apocrypha (Oklahoma Univ. Press), called "brilliant" by the Los Angeles Times reviewer, Susan Salter Reynolds.

Luvaas is the editor of an anthology of writings about the Coronavirus: The Corona Chronicles from Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and an anthology of California writers, Into The Deep End: The Writing Center Anthology 3.