[6][4] He moved to New York City in 1984 where he completed his BA and MA degrees at Hunter College and studied in the MFA program at The New School.

[7] Released in 2001, Hubner's first novel, American By Blood, was a Barnes & Noble Notable Discover Finalist and was optioned by The Kennedy/Marshall Company but stalled in the development phase.

[8][9] This historical novel was inspired by his great-great-grandfather, August, a member of the U.S. Army who arrived one-day too late for Col. George Armstrong Custer's last stand at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

[10] The Boston Review spoke of Hubner alongside authors Kent Haruf and Cormac McCarthy as initiating a new style of American formalism, dependent less on explicit character development than on skillful evocation of time and place: "Huebner’s technique so obviously recalls McCarthy’s—just as Haruf's did—and is at times so brilliant that it wins over even a reader who sees its roots.

"[12] Hubner himself compared his prose to opera, where characters play out their roles on a grand stage, saying "What I am looking for is something operatic, like the circus again where there's something happening all at the same time in three different places.

[13][20] One reviewer noted, "East of Bowery, hits all the low spots, giving readers a panoramic tour of the burnt-out squats, copping places, and holding pens that make up a user’s habitual itinerary.

Yet unlike such writers as Jim Carroll—who in The Basketball Diaries glamorizes his outlaw adventures—or Irvine Welsh—whose novel Trainspotting emphasizes the stoner humor of its characters, with the jokes always on them—Hubner...is most concerned with tracing his hero to a specific time and place.

[1][23] In interviews and through his semi-biographical novels and short stories, Hubner was open about his blue-collar family's history of violence and the military, along with his own struggles with drugs, addiction, homelessness, and institutionalization.