Professor Altschul teaches fiction workshops, narrative craft classes, and courses in 20th and 21st century American literature.

He is the author of the novels The Gringa (2020), Deus Ex Machina (2011), and Lady Lazarus (2008). His short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, McSweeney's, The Wall Street Journal, Ploughshares, Fence, One Story, Zyzzyva, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best New American Voices, California Prose Directory, and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, he has also received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, the Ucross Foundation, the Fundación Valparaíso, and the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. He is a Contributing Editor at Zyzzyva. Before coming to CSU he taught at Stanford, Mills College, and the University of San Francisco; from 2009-2015 he directed the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University.