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C. Michael Curtis - C. Michael Curtis has been an editor at The Atlantic since 1963. Under his direction, the magazine has won numerous fiction prizes, including the National Magazine Award for fiction. More

C. Michael Curtis"Writers crave the intelligence and ardor of this magazine's editors and readership as well as the privilege of inclusion in its pages," says best-selling author Louise Erdrich, who, like so many young fiction writers, was introduced to national readership and subsequent success in The Atlantic Monthly.

Under the direction of senior editor C. Michael Curtis, The Atlantic Monthly's fiction has been nominated for a National Magazine Award virtually every year; in 1988 The Atlantic won this prestigious prize. Year after year short stories from the magazine are chosen for inclusion in the important annual prize collections. Curtis himself was the editor of American Stories: Fiction From The Atlantic Monthly, which was published in 1990. A second volume came out the following year, and 1992 saw the publication of Contemporary New England Stories. A companion volume, Contemporary West Coast Stories, was published in the fall of 1993. A fifth collection, entitled God: Stories, was published in December, 1998, by Houghton Mifflin, and a companion anthology, Faith: Stories, was published in 2003, also by Houghton Mifflin. His own essays, articles, reviews, and poems have been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, National Review, and Sport, among other periodicals. Curtis is also renowned for his teaching: he has taught creative writing, ethics, grammar, and other subjects for more than thirty years at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington, and elsewhere, and now teaches writing at Wofford College, in Spartanburg, SC, where he occupies the John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities.

Curtis earned a B.A. in English from Cornell in 1956. He came to The Atlantic in 1963 after four years of study toward a Ph.D. in government, also at Cornell. Previously he had worked as a reporter for The Ithaca Journal, and as an editorial assistant at Newsweek. While he was a graduate student, The Atlantic Monthly published three of his poems and employed him briefly as a summer reader.

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'The Good Wife' Battles an Unruly Teenager and a Narcoleptic Judge

By C. Michael Curtis

Feb 23 2011, 12:05 PM ET Comment

TheGoodWife_SilverBullet_post.jpg

CBS

In this week's episode of The Good Wife, Alicia helps win a case involving Diane's on again off again romantic interest, a crack armaments specialist whose un-intentionally flawed testimony helped put a gang-banger (now both righteous and litigious) in prison.

Alicia's toughest case, however, is her teenage daughter, whose rampant but not very well informed idealism has created problems at school and some challenging conversations with Alicia. As usual, Alicia is both patient and non-judgmental (though permitted to dismiss organized religion with a flip "doesn't work for me") and, at episode's end, seems to have successfully defused at least a few of her daughter's potential explosions.

In the meantime, Eli, Peter's campaign manager, has stumbled in to an extremely tentative relationship with a Mexican woman, seeking citizenship, who once worked as a nanny, illegally, for one of Peter's political opponents. The Mexican woman, now an investment whiz, will, if exposed, gravely damage the candidacy of her former employer, but Eli, divorced and a father, is beset by ambivalence toward a woman he has come to respect and possibly desire. Keep tuned for this one. And hope for more appearances from Gerry Stiller, who appears briefly as a judge suffering from sleep deprivation.

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