Tim W. Brown

Tim W. Brown, b. 1961, was editor and publisher of Tomorrow Magazine, a poetry zine based in Chicago, Illinois, from 1982 to 1999. Founded while Brown was an undergraduate at Northern Illinois University, his zine's mission was to publish tomorrow's poetry today.

Anti-academic in character from the beginning, Tomorrow initially featured writers from Chicago's performance poetry scene, which in the 1980s experienced a renaissance, particularly with the advent of poetry slams. Its focus gradually expanded during the 1990s and came to include the best-known underground poets from all over the U.S. and beyond. An early adopter of computer technology, Brown was among the first to desktop-publish his zine using the IBM personal computer introduced in the early 1980s.

Brown is the author of two chapbooks, The Toy Store (1995), a collection of four interrelated short stories, and Starstruck (1996), a collection of his poems. He has published two novels, Deconstruction Acres (1997), a novel set in a Midwestern college town told from a townie's point of view, and Left of the Loop (2001), an autobiographical novel set in a loft in Chicago's meatpacking district. His third novel, Walking Man, a fictional biography that describes the life and times of the most famous zinester in America, is expected to be published in 2008.

Brown's fiction typically is comic in tone and satirizes such topics as love, death, politics, corporate life, academia, and, especially, art and literature.