About

Carlo Rotella is a writer, journalist, and scholar. His new book is What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (September, 2025). Among the subjects that recur in his writing are cities and city life, teaching and learning, boxing, blues, country music, crime, fantasy and science fiction, movies, basketball, landscape, the Rust Belt, children and parents, neighborhood, Chicago, Boston, and how people get good at things.

His other books include The World Is Always Coming to An End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood (2019), Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (2012), Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (2005), Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt (2004), and October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature (1998).  With Michael Ezra, he edited The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside (2017).

Carlo has been a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine since 2007, and he has also been an op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe and commentator for WGBH FM. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, the Washington Post Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Boston, DoubleTake, Slate, The Believer, The American Scholar, TriQuarterly, Critical Inquiry, American Quarterly, the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and other periodicals. It has also appeared in anthologies and collections that include The Best American Essays, the Library of America’s At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, the U. S. State Department’s My Town: Writers on American Cities, The Cambridge Companion to Boxing, Our Boston: Writers Celebrate the City They Love, and Harvard’s A New Literary History of America. He is co-editor and founder of the University of Chicago Press’s “Chicago Visions and Revisions” book series.

Carlo has held Guggenheim, Howard, and Du Bois fellowships, and U.S. State Department Speaker and Specialist grants to lecture in China and Bosnia.  He has received the Whiting Writers Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, The American Scholar’s prizes for Best Essay and Best Work by a Younger Writer, and several Barney and Bernie awards for feature writing from the Boxing Writers Association of America.

He is a professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College.