Heidi Wedel Durrow | |
---|---|
Born | June 21, 1969 |
Nationality | American |
Education | Stanford University Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (MS) Yale Law School (JD) |
Heidi W. Durrow (born June 21, 1969) is an American writer, author of best-seller [1] The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, and the winner of the 2008 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction. [2] [3]
Durrow, the daughter of a Danish immigrant and an African-American Air Force man, grew up in part overseas in Turkey, Germany, and Denmark. [4] In 1980 her family settled in Portland, Oregon, [5] where she attended Jefferson High School. She majored in English at Stanford University and wrote a weekly column for the Stanford Daily, graduating in 1991 with Honors. She continued her education at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and received a M.S. in 1992. She then attended Yale Law School and received her J.D. in 1995.
Durrow's career began at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City, where she worked as a corporate litigator on antitrust, commercial contracts, and employment discrimination cases. She left Cravath in 1997 to pursue a literary career.
Durrow worked as a consultant to the National Basketball Association and National Football League as a Life Skills trainer from 2000 to 2006. [6]
Durrow was a host of the award-winning weekly podcast Mixed Chicks Chat focused on issues of being racially and culturally mixed. [7]
In 2008 Durrow became a founder of the now defunct Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival. [8] The Festival—which ran from 2008 to 2012—celebrated stories of the Mixed experience including stories about biracial identity, transracially adopted families, and interracial and intercultural relationships and friendships. The Festival presented films, readings, workshops, a family event, and the largest West Coast "((Loving Day celebration))".
Durrow created a new festival called the Mixed Remixed Festival which premiered June 14, 2014. [9]
Durrow was named a Power 100 Leader by Ebony Magazine in 2010 and was nominated for a 2011 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Debut.
The Girl Who Fell From the Sky was published February 16, 2010 by Algonquin Books.
The book won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction (2008) [10] and was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award for Debut Author (2010) [11] and Carnegie Medal (2011).
In 2022, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky was listed among 52 books banned by the Alpine School District following the implementation of Utah law H.B. 374, “Sensitive Materials In Schools." [12] Forty-two percent of removed books “feature LBGTQ+ characters and or themes.” [13] [12] [14]
Durrow has received multiple fellowships and grants for her writing, including the following:
Year | Title | Award | Result | Ref. |
---|---|---|---|---|
2004 | Chapter One Fiction Contest | Winner | [ citation needed ] | |
2004 | Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition | Winner | [ citation needed ] | |
2008 | The Girl Who Fell From the Sky | Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change | Winner | |
2010 | Goodreads Choice Award for Debut Author | Nominee | [11] | |
2011 | Carnegie Medal | Nominee | [16] |
Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.
Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Ann Patchett is an American author. She received the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in the same year, for her novel Bel Canto. Patchett's other novels include The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), Taft (1994), The Magician's Assistant (1997), Run (2007), State of Wonder (2011), Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023). The Dutch House was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Danzy Senna is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of six books and numerous essays about race, gender and American identity, including Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2003),New People (2017), named by Time as one of the Top Ten Novels of the year, and Colored Television (2024). Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker,The Atlantic,Vogue, and The New York Times. She is a professor of English at the University of Southern California.
Andrew Sean Greer is an American novelist and short story writer. Greer received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Less. He is the author of The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel", and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award.
Anna Funder is an Australian author. She is the author of Stasiland, All That I Am, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life and the novella The Girl With the Dogs.
Loving Day is an annual celebration held on June 12, the anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in sixteen U.S. states. In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were U.S. state laws banning mixed-race marriages. The Warren Court ruled unanimously in 1967 that these state laws were unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the court majority opinion that "the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State."
Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. From 2018 to 2020, she served as the president of PEN America.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
The PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, formerly known as the Bellwether Prize for Fiction is a biennial award given by the PEN America and Barbara Kingsolver to a U.S. citizen for a previously unpublished work of fiction that address issues of social justice. The prize was established by noted author Barbara Kingsolver, and is funded by her. Winning authors receive a $25,000 award and a publishing contract, from which they receive royalties.
Workman Publishing Company, Inc., is an American publisher of trade books founded by Peter Workman. The company consists of imprints Workman, Workman Children's, Workman Calendars, Artisan, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and Algonquin Young Readers, Storey Publishing, and Timber Press.
Lucy Jane Bledsoe is an American novelist. She has received many awards for her fiction, including two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships, a California Arts Council Fellowship, a Yaddo Fellowship, the American Library Association Stonewall Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Saturday Evening Post Fiction Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, two Pushcart nominations, and the Devil's Kitchen Fiction Award. She is a six-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and a three-time finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom is an American novelist.
Idra Novey is an American novelist, poet, and translator. She translates from Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
M. M. De Voe is an American author.
Mitchell S. Jackson is an American writer. He is the author of the 2013 novel The Residue Years, as well as Oversoul (2012), an ebook collection of essays and short stories. Jackson is a Whiting Award recipient and a former winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. In 2021, while an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery for Runner's World. As of 2021, Jackson is the John O. Whiteman Dean's Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.
Yewande Omotoso is a South African-based novelist, architect and designer, who was born in Barbados and grew up in Nigeria. She currently lives in Johannesburg. Her two published novels have earned her considerable attention, including winning the South African Literary Award for First-Time Published Author, being shortlisted for the South African Sunday Times Fiction Prize, the M-Net Literary Awards 2012, and the 2013 Etisalat Prize for Literature, and being longlisted for the 2017 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction. She is the daughter of Nigerian writer Kole Omotoso, and the sister of filmmaker Akin Omotoso.
Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo is a Nigerian author and educator, whose published work includes novels, poetry, short stories, books for children, essays and journalism. She is the winner of several awards in Nigeria, including the Nigeria Prize for Literature.
Patricia Engel is a Colombian-American writer, professor of creative writing at the University of Miami, and author of five books, including Vida, which was a PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award Finalist and winner of the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana, Colombia's national prize in literature. She was the first woman, and Vida the first book in translation, to receive the prize.
Nancy Agabian is an American writer, activist, and teacher, currently lecturing at New York University, Gallatin. She is of Armenian origin, and her memoir about her childhood, Me as Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, won Lambda Literary's Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction.