 |
Hope Edelman | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | June 17, 1964 New York City, United States |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Genre | Non-fiction, memoir |
| Notable works | Motherless Daughters, The Possibility of Everything |
| Spouse | Uzi Eliahou |
| Children | Maya Eliahou, Eden Eliahou |
Hope Edelman (born June 17, 1964) is an American non-fiction author, essayist, and writing instructor. [1]
Edelman is the author of eight non-fiction books, including Motherless Daughters; Motherless Mothers; the memoir The Possibility of Everything and her most recent book, The Aftergrief. Her writing and teaching has garnered her acclaim as a writer, writing instructor, and expert on early parent loss. [2]
Edelman was born in New York City and spent most of her childhood in suburban Spring Valley, New York. The death of her mother to breast cancer in 1981 was a pivotal moment in her adolescence and became the subject of much of her early writing. She obtained her bachelor's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in Evanston, Illinois. While living in the Chicago area, she interned at Outside magazine. After graduation, she took an editorial job at Whittle Communication in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she discovered a love for the personal essay. She then attended The Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she studied with Carl Klaus, Mary Swander, and Carol Bly, earning a master's degree in nonfiction writing in 1992. [3]
In 1992, she moved to New York City to write her first book, Motherless Daughters. In 1997, she relocated to Los Angeles, where she married Uzi Eliahou and raised two daughters, Maya and Eden. She has lived in Topanga Canyon, California, for more than two decades.
Edelman's first book, Motherless Daughters, was started and sold in proposal form to Addison-Wesley when she was still a graduate student at the University of Iowa. It was published in May 1994. A 17-city tour and extensive media coverage followed, pushing the book to the top of bestseller lists in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Motherless Daughters spent a total of 24 weeks on the New York Times list and rose to No. 1 in paperback. [4] The book has since been published in fourteen countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, China, Korea, Poland, Russia, and the Czech Republic. [5]
Moved by the volume and content of thousands of handwritten letters she received from readers, Edelman edited Letters from Motherless Daughters the following year. In 1999, she published Mother of My Mother, an examination of grandmother-granddaughter relationships. Motherless Mothers, an exploration and explanation of how motherless women parent their children differently from the general population, was released by HarperCollins in 2006.
In 2009, Edelman published her first full-length memoir, The Possibility of Everything (Ballantine). The book covers a three-month period during early motherhood when Edelman's three-year-old daughter developed an aggressive imaginary friend, prompting Edelman and her then-husband to make the unconventional choice to bring the child to Mayan healers in Belize in search of a spiritual cure. The story details Edelman's personal journey over those weeks from a “hard-core cynical intellectual” to someone open to the possibility of the unseen. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it “a charming memoir full of self-deprecating humor,” and People lauded is as “an intimate account of the struggles of parenting, partnering and faith.”[ citation needed ]
Her eighth book, The AfterGrief: Finding Your Way Along the Long Arc of Loss, was released in October 2020. Kirkus Reviews called it, “Lucid . . . Noteworthy . . . a timelessly relevant chronicle on enduring grief.” From 2020 to 2021, Edelman appeared on a number of television news shows to talk about COVID-19 deaths and the aftergrief, a period she defines as starting when the most acute phase of grief starts to diminish and extending for the rest of your life.
Edelman has been teaching nonfiction writing for more than twenty years, most recently as an associate faculty member at Antioch University in Los Angeles. She has also taught at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, Ohio State University, University of Iowa, UCLA Extension, as well as at Hedgebrook writing retreats on Whidbey Island, Washington, and Tuscany, Italy.
Awards include a Pushcart Prize for creative nonfiction, a New York Times Notable Book designation, and a Community Educator Award from the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC). Since 2016, she has been leading retreats and workshops for motherless women and online support groups for adults who experienced early parent loss.
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.
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).
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.
Kaylie Jones is an American writer, memoirist and novelist.
Kathryn Harrison is an American author. She has published seven novels, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book of true crime. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, Salon, and Nerve.
Jeffrey Lloyd Zaslow was an American author and journalist, and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.
Ann Hood is an American novelist and short story writer; she has also written nonfiction. The author of fourteen novels, four memoirs, a short story collection, a ten book series for middle readers and one young adult novel. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House. Hood is a regular contributor to The New York Times' Op-Ed page, Home Economics column. Her most recent work is "Fly Girl: A Memoir," published with W.W. Norton and Company in 2022.
Jacki Lyden is an American journalist and author of the memoir, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (1999).
Robin Hemley, born in New York City, is an American nonfiction and fiction writer. He is the author of fifteen books, and has had work published in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Conjunctions, The Sun, and Narrative, among others. In 2020, he joined the faculty of Long Island University, where his is Director and Polk Professor in Residence of the George Polk School of Communications.
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic. She has experimented with different styles of writing, including writing obituaries for parts of her life, including her parents and herself, in OBIT, letters in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and a Japanese form known as waka in The Trees Witness Everything. In all of her poems and books, Chang has several common themes: living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. She has also written three books for children.
Lisa Dale Norton is an American author best known as a writer of literary nonfiction and creative nonfiction. She is the great-niece of Evelyn Maurine Norton Lincoln, U.S. President John F. Kennedy's personal secretary. Norton makes her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Martha Frankel is an American writer. She was born in the Bronx, New York.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart (2010) and the essay collections Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).
Amy M. Homes is an American writer best known for her controversial novels and unusual short stories, which feature extreme situations and characters. Notably, her novel The End of Alice (1996) is about a convicted child molester and murderer.
Leslie Sierra Jamison is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of the 2010 novel The Gin Closet and the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison also directs the nonfiction concentration in writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Jennifer Lauck is an American fiction and non-fiction author, essayist, speaker and writing instructor. She is the author of four books including the New York Times best seller Blackbird. Her writing has been published in the U.S. and around the world and translated into several languages. Much of her popularity began when she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2000 and Winfrey held the book up to her audience saying, "This should have been a book of the month book. Read it now."
Mary Allen is an author and writing coach living in Iowa City, Iowa. She is an MFA graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and published her first memoir, The Rooms of Heaven, in 2000. She received an NEA fellowship in 2002.
Mieke Eerkens is a Dutch-American writer. Her book, All Ships Follow Me., was published by Picador (imprint) in 2019. Her work has been anthologized in W. W. Norton & Company’s Fakes, edited by David Shields; Best Travel Writing 2011; and Outpost 19’s A Book of Uncommon Prayer, among others. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Nonfiction Writing.
Crying in H Mart: A Memoir is a 2021 memoir by Michelle Zauner, singer and guitarist of the musical project Japanese Breakfast. It is her debut book, published on April 20, 2021, by Alfred A. Knopf. It is an expansion of Zauner's essay of the same name which was published in The New Yorker on August 20, 2018. The title mentions H Mart, a North American supermarket chain that specializes in Korean and other Asian products.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
