Fern Lee Kupfer is an American author and retired professor of creative writing at Iowa State University. She has written several novels and as well as memoirs reflecting on her life experiences, the discovery that she is a carrier of the BRCA gene, and the loss of her son to Canavan disease. [1]
Kupfer was born in 1946 and grew up in Plainview, Long Island. In 1968 she received her BA from State University of New York at Cortland. She moved to Iowa with her first husband in the early 1970s after having been a high school English teacher and working at a day care center in Rochester, New York. [2] [3] She received her master's degree in English from Iowa State University in 1975, with a thesis on the concept of androgyny in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and later taught creative writing at the university for many years.
She has written several novels and two memoirs as well as contributing regular columns to the Ames Tribune and Newsday . [4] [5] Her first book, Before and After Zachariah, originally published by Delacorte Press in 1982, is a reflection on her family's decision to institutionalize her severely handicapped son. [1] The experience made her an advocate for parents who choose institutionalized care for children with severe disabilities. [2] The book has had 5 editions published between 1982 and 1998 and has also been published in French as Avant et après Zacharie. Her most recent memoir, Leaving Long Island and other departures, published in 2012, includes her experiences of divorce, the discovery that she carries the BRCA gene, and raising a blended family. [1]
Kupfer's first marriage to Joseph Kupfer, a philosophy scholar whom she married in Williamsville, New York in the late 1960s, ended in divorce. They had two children, a daughter, Gabi and their late son, Zachariah. [2] She is now married to Joseph Geha, a Lebanese-American academic and author of the novel, Lebanese Blonde. The couple live in Ames, Iowa. [6]
Ames is a city in Story County, Iowa, United States, located approximately 30 miles (48 km) north of Des Moines in central Iowa. It is best known as the home of Iowa State University (ISU), with leading agriculture, design, engineering, and veterinary medicine colleges. A United States Department of Energy national laboratory, Ames Laboratory, is located on the ISU campus.
Charlotte's Web is a book of children's literature by American author E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams. It was published on October 15, 1952, by Harper & Brothers. The novel tells the story of a livestock pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a barn spider named Charlotte. When Wilbur is in danger of being slaughtered by the farmer, Charlotte writes messages in her web praising Wilbur, such as "Some Pig", "Terrific", "Radiant", and "Humble", to persuade the farmer to let him live.
Sara Paretsky is an American author of detective fiction, best known for her novels focused on the protagonist V. I. Warshawski.
Marilynne Summers Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Jack Reacher is the protagonist of a series of crime thriller novels by British author Lee Child, a 2012 film adaptation, its 2016 sequel, and a television series on Amazon Prime Video. In the stories, Jack Reacher was a major in the US Army's military police. After leaving the army, Reacher roamed the United States, taking odd jobs investigating suspicious and dangerous situations, and resolving them.
Amelia Holt Atwater-Rhodes, known professionally as Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, is an American author of fantasy and young adult literature and a Language Arts/Literature teacher at Learning Prep School in West Newton, MA.
Gilead is a novel written by Marilynne Robinson published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is Robinson's second novel, following Housekeeping (1980). Gilead is an epistolary novel, as the entire narrative is a single, continuing, albeit episodic, document, written on several occasions in a form combining a journal and a memoir. It comprises the fictional autobiography of John Ames, an elderly, white Congregationalist pastor in the small, secluded town of Gilead, Iowa, who knows that he is dying of a heart condition. At the beginning of the book, the date is established as 1956, and Ames explains that he is writing an account of his life for his seven-year-old son, who will have few memories of him. Ames indicates he was born in 1880 and that, at the time of writing, he is seventy-six years old.
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is a historical novel by the American author Avi published in 1990. The book is marketed towards children at a reading level of grades 5–8. The book chronicles the evolution of the title character as she is pushed outside her naive existence and learns about life aboard a ship crossing from England to America in 1832. The novel was well received and won several awards, including being named as a Newbery Honor book in 1991.
Jayne Anne Phillips is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer who was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia.
Joan Baehler Bauer is an American writer of young adult literature currently residing with her husband Evan Bauer in Brooklyn. Bauer was born in River Forest, Illinois. They are the parents of one daughter, Jean. Before becoming a famous author Joan spent years working for McGraw-Hill and the Chicago Tribune. She also did some work in advertising, marketing, and screenwriting.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy was a Trinidad-born American writer who grew up in the New York metropolitan area. Her family had immigrated and she was orphaned when young. Raised in foster homes, she later was acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people that stressed supportive relationships.
Fanny Fern, was an American novelist, children's writer, humorist, and newspaper columnist in the 1850s to 1870s. Her popularity has been attributed to a conversational style and sense of what mattered to her mostly middle-class female readers.
Sandra Scofield is an American novelist, essayist, editor and author of writers’ guides.
Ruth Suckow was an American writer from Iowa. She wrote novels and stories.
Sarah Elizabeth Wright was an American writer and social activist. Her novel This Child's Gonna Live, published in 1969, was acclaimed by critics and "was among the first to focus on the confluence of race, class and sex". The New York Times named it "outstanding book of 1969" and it was called a "small masterpiece".
Melanie Benjamin – is the pen name of American writer Melanie Hauser.
Joseph Geha, professor-emeritus at Iowa State University, is the author of two books, Through and Through: Toledo Stories, one of the first books of modern Arab-American fiction, and Lebanese Blonde, a novel. He has also published poems, plays, essays and short fiction in periodicals and anthologies such as Esquire, Growing Up Ethnic in America, and The New York Times.
Joyce Burditt, also known as Joyce Rebeta-Burditt, was an American writer and network executive. She was known for creating the TV series Diagnosis: Murder. She was also a longtime writer and producer on such TV series as Perry Mason, Matlock, and the Father Dowling Mysteries. She wrote a best selling novel, The Cracker Factory, in 1977, about an alcoholic housewife, partly drawn from her own experiences.
Burnt Offerings is a 1973 American horror novel by Robert Marasco. Its plot follows a family who move into a summer home where each member is plagued by unusual experiences and personality changes. Published by Delacorte Press, the novel had originally been conceived as a screenplay before Marasco rewrote it into a novel. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1976. The novel was reprinted in 2015 by Valancourt Press.
Kiersten White is an American author of fiction for children, young adults, and adults. Her first book, Paranormalcy, was published by HarperCollins in 2009.
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