Two Pumps for the Body Man

B.A. East grew up in Connecticut, studying writing, journalism, and literature at Central Connecticut State University. Prior to that he had some success cutting up his fingers as a deli clerk and reading pulp in the stockroom of the local K-Mart. After graduation Ben studied education at the University of New Haven while working as a long-term sub in a tough neighborhood where his main duty was to prevent food fights in the cafeteria. Succeeding in this, he joined the Peace Corps and spent two years teaching the eager young students at Providence Girls Secondary School in Malawi, traveling around Africa between terms, usually on the back of a lorry or beside chickens on a bus. When Ben returned to the U.S. in 1999, he found the whole world had got connected to the Internet while he was gone. He endured a year and a half teaching high school dropouts at an alternative incarceration center in Connecticut and at Brooklyn College Academy in New York, then quickly fled overseas again. He spent two years teaching British and American Literature at the American School of Asuncion in landlocked Paraguay, learning to surf in Brazil between terms. Ben later joined the State Department’s Foreign Service, spent a year studying Arabic, and shipped off to his first assignment adjudicating visas in Saudi Arabia. Subsequent tours have included work in Managua, Nicaragua; Accra, Ghana; Mexico City; and Washington, DC. Ben’s manuscript treating espionage and the West African coke trade was shortlisted in 2014 for the Dundee International Book Prize and the Leapfrog Press Fiction Prize. His short stories and novel reviews have appeared in The Foreign Service Journal, Atticus Review, Crime Factory Magazine, and other publications. He’s at work on a novel about the lack of a national conversation on gun control.