I’m an award-winning novelist, journalist, professor, screenwriter, and ghostwriter.

My first novel, The Death and Life of August Sweeney, longlisted for the Dzanc Prize for fiction, will be published by Santa Fe Writers' Project in 2025.

I’m a regular contributor of feature pieces to national publications, and my journalism, fiction, and criticism have appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, Eater, Longreads, Elemental, Hazlitt, Gawker, NYLON, Hobart, Barrelhouse, Catapult, The Times Literary Supplement, and many others. I wrote the semi-regular "Dispatches from the Swamp" column for The Rumpus, and my travel writing has appeared in Roads and Kingdoms.

I am a professor of Creative Writing at George Washington University, where I created a class called The Working Writer, which gives students the tools they need to navigate the publishing and freelancing landscape.

As an NYT-bestselling ghostwriter, I’ve worked with a wide range of clients, from politicians and CEOs to legal experts and entrepreneurs. I’ve received multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Council on the Arts and Humanities, and am an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. I’ve been a featured guest on Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio Show and the PathPod medical podcast, and my work was noted in Best American Food Writing 2020 and Best American Science Writing 2021.

Born and raised in Manhattan, I attended Trinity College Dublin before receiving my B.A. from Columbia University. I hold an M.F.A. in fiction from George Mason University, where I received the inaugural Travel Research Award from the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center, which sent me to France to work in restaurant kitchens in Summer 2017.

I now live with my wife and two sons in Washington, DC, where I’m trying to master the art of at-home pizza making while working on a novel about the most powerful civil servant in the history of the US government–who also happened to be a Soviet asset. You can find me on Bluesky at @samuelashworth getting very worked up about the US Women’s National Soccer team.