In his spare time, Morse likes to renovate old houses, play tennis, go rock climbing with his daughter, and toss the frisbee for his border collie, who is the best athlete in the family.
Originally from south Georgia, David Lawrence Morse is a fiction writer, playwright, and the director of the Writing Program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, One Story, Missouri Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. His first collection of stories, The Book of Disbelieving, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in July 2023. The stories in the collection tend toward the fantastic and the speculative—fables that dramatize our era’s crisis of faith in the nature and meaning of reality. It is a concern with language and its ability to distort or capture reality that animates his teaching at the Jackson School, where as a writing instructor he offers courses on policy writing and on disinformation and the craft of persuasion. Prior to coming to Yale, he taught for nearly twenty years at the University of Michigan, where in addition to a variety of writing classes he also taught courses on utopianism and the politics and ethics of lying. His first play, Quartet, concerning Beethoven’s composition of the late string quartets, was performed by the Takács Quartet and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.