Elliott Holt | |
|---|---|
 Holt in 2012 | |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Kenyon College Brooklyn College |
| Genre | novelist |
Elliott Holt is an American fiction writer and former ad copywriter. [1] In 2013, she published You Are One of Them , a novel based on the true story of Samantha Smith.
Holt was born in Washington, DC and is the daughter of the public broadcasting pioneer, Samuel C. O. Holt. [2] [3]
Holt attended Kenyon College as an undergraduate, where she "credits her experiences at Kenyon as a drama major with honing her fiction-writing skills." [4] She then went on to pursue her MFA at Brooklyn College, where she studied with professors such as Michael Cunningham, and received the Himan Brown award. [5] [6]
Holt won a 2011 Pushcart Prize for her story "Fem Care" and was the runner-up of the 2011 PEN Emerging Writers Award for her story "The Norwegians." She was also part of Twitter's 2012 #twitterfiction festival. [7]
In 2007 New York magazine named Holt one of their "Future Writing Stars in New York's Writing Programs". [8]
In 2013, Holt published a novel, You Are One of Them , that draws on the true story of Samantha Smith, an American schoolgirl who wrote to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov at the height of the Cold War. [9] Smith then visited the Soviet Union on a peace tour but died in a plane crash en route home. [9] In Holt’s retelling, the schoolgirl’s childhood friend goes to post-Soviet Russia in search of her friend more than a decade later after hearing her friend may still be alive, having defected to the USSR. [10] The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice [11] and was widely and favorably reviewed. [12] [13] [14] In the New York Times Book Review, Maggie Shipstead wrote, "…You Are One of Them” is a hugely absorbing first novel from a writer with a fluid, vivid style and a rare knack for balancing the pleasure of entertainment with the deeper gratification of insight." [14]
Holt was a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts prose fellow. [2]
Karen Louise Erdrich is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Katharine Weber is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. She has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at Yale University, Goucher College, the Paris Writers Workshop and elsewhere. She held the Visiting Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at Kenyon College from 2012 to 2019.
Janet Peery is an American short story writer and novelist.
Plainsong is a novel by Kent Haruf. Set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, it tells the interlocking stories of some of the inhabitants. The title comes from a type of unadorned music sung in Christian churches, and is a reference to both the Great Plains setting and the simple style of the writing.
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Jean Merrill was an American writer of children's books and editor, known best for The Pushcart War, a novel published in 1964. She died from cancer at her home in Randolph, Vermont, in 2012, aged 89.
Deb Olin Unferth is an American short story writer, novelist, and memoirist. She is the author of the collection of stories Minor Robberies, the novel Vacation, both published by McSweeney's, and the memoir, Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, published by Henry Holt. Unferth was a finalist for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir, Revolution.
Elizabeth Graver is an American writer and academic.
Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Beginning a career in poetry, her collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Later prose works received more exposure and notoriety. She is a multiple award winner: her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. In addition to her writing activities, she has been a contributing editor for the London Review of Books since 2019.
Alice Mattison is an American novelist and short story writer.
You Are One of Them is a 2013 novel by Elliott Holt. It is based on the true story of American schoolgirl Samantha Smith who wrote to Yuri Andropov, the Premier of the Soviet Union, at the height of the Cold War. Holt's first novel, You Are One of Them received predominantly positive reviews. Most critics praised Holt's use of language and description of characters, though some expressed reservations about its genre.
Celeste Ng is an American writer and novelist. She has released many short stories that have been published in a variety of literary journals. Ng's first novel, Everything I Never Told You, released on June 26, 2014, won the Amazon Book of the Year award as well as praise from critics. Ng's short story Girls at Play won a Pushcart Prize in 2012, and was a 2015 recipient of an Alex Award. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was published in 2017. The TV-miniseries based on the book premiered in 2020. Ng received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Her most recent novel, Our Missing Hearts, was released on October 4, 2022.
Maggie Shipstead is an American novelist, short story author, essayist, and travel writer. She is the author of Seating Arrangements (2012) Astonish Me (2014), Great Circle (2021), and the short story collection You Have a Friend in 10A (2022).
Anna Solomon is an American novelist.
Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
Krys Lee is a Korean-American author based in South Korea, a journalist, and translator. She wrote the short story collection Drifting House (2012) and the novel How I Became a North Korean (2016). She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at Underwood International College, Yonsei University. She was awarded the Rome Prize, the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and the Honor Title in Adult Fiction Literature from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the BBC International Story Prize.
Lisa Allen-Agostini is a Trinidadian journalist, editor and writer of fiction, poetry and drama. She is also a stand-up comedian, performing as "Just Lisa".
Marie-Helene Bertino is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of three novels, Beautyland (2024), Parakeet (2020) and 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), and one short story collection, Safe as Houses (2012). She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize for her short stories.
Great Circle is a 2021 novel by American writer Maggie Shipstead, published on May 4, 2021, by Alfred A. Knopf.
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