 |
Marcia Aldrich | |
|---|---|
| Born | Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation | Nonfiction writer, essayist, memoirist |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Literary nonfiction |
Marcia Aldrich is an American author of literary nonfiction and memoir.
|
Marcia Aldrich | |
|---|---|
| Born | Allentown, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation | Nonfiction writer, essayist, memoirist |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Literary nonfiction |
Marcia Aldrich is an American author of literary nonfiction and memoir.
Marcia Aldrich was born and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Pomona College, in Claremont, California, and earned a master's in creative writing and a doctorate in English literature at the University of Washington.
Aldrich taught creative writing and English literature at Michigan State University from 1990 until her retirement in 2017. In 2010 she was the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College. From 2008 to 2011 she edited Fourth Genre, one of the premiere journals featuring personal essays and memoirs.
She received the Amoco Foundation Excellence in Teaching Award in 1995 and the Michigan State University Alumni Club of Mid-Michigan's Quality in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2009. [1] In 2010 she was named Distinguished Professor of the Year by the Presidents Council of the State Universities of Michigan. [2]
Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, which was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Series and cited among Notable Twentieth Century American Literary Nonfiction in The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Houghton Mifflin).
The collection Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, edited by Aldrich, appeared in 2016. [3]
In 2022 Aldrich published Edge, a chapbook of essays from New Michigan Press. Her own account of this work appeared in Essay Daily.
Aldrich's most recent volume is Studio of the Voice, a collection of essays published in 2024 by Wandering Aengus Press.
One of the memoir essays from Girl Rearing, "Hair," was published in The Best American Essays, selected by Joseph Epstein. "Hair" has also been included in the college edition of Best American Essays, in The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, and in Laughing Matters, edited by Marvin Diogenes, in a chapter called "Observations on Gender."
Her essay "The Art of Being Born," originally published in Hotel Amerika, was selected by Cheryl Strayed for inclusion in The Best American Essays 2013. [4]
Eighteen of her essays have been selected as Notable Essays in the Best American Essays series.
Her personal essays have also been published in the Gettysburg Review , North American Review , Witness, Arts and Letters, Northwest Review , Brevity, The Normal School, Kenyon Review, Hotel Amerika, and Seneca Review, among others.
Joyce Dyer is a U.S. writer of nonfiction. Her memoir Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood tells the story of the author's attempt to remember the first five years of her life growing up in an ethnic neighborhood in Akron called Old Wolf Ledge, famous for its glacial formations, breweries, and cereal mills. Goosetown is the prequel to Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town, her book about the decades when Akron was the Rubber Capital of the World. In it Dyer provides a loving but complicated portrait of her father and a view of the relationship between the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, its employees, and the city of Akron, Ohio. An earlier memoir, In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer's Journey, was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 1996, shortly after the death of Annabelle Coyne, the author's mother. Dyer has also edited two collections of essays, Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers and From Curlers to Chainsaws: Women and Their Machines. Her first book, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings, was a scholarly study of Kate Chopin, a turn-of-the-century American writer. Joyce Dyer is Professor Emerita of English at Hiram College, where she directed the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature and held the John S. Kenyon Chair in English for several years. Recipient of the 1998 Appalachian Book of the Year Award, the 2009 David B. Saunders Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2016 Independent Book Publisher Gold Medal Award for anthology, and Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, Dyer spent the last ten years working on a book about abolitionist John Brown, who grew up in Hudson, Ohio, where the author lives. A mix of memoir, biography, public history, and travel writing, Pursuing John Brown: On the Trail of a Radical Abolitionist was published by the University of Akron Press in May of 2022. In this book for general readers, Dyer reveals surprising details about John Brown’s life and grapples with troubling questions he raises. The book has been called "a thoughtful, elegantly written contribution to American studies" by Kirkus Reviews and awarded honorable mention by Civil War Monitor in their list of Best Civil War Books of 2022. Indiana Magazine of History said Dyer worked "in a wholly creative, compulsively readable, fiercely original, and deeply contemplative way" and concluded, "This is a phenomenal book." And the Journal of Southern History said, "Dyer provides a narrative of intellectual and ethical reflections and growth.. . Further, in a climate that prioritizes the alleviation of supposed white discomfort over the instruction of history, this work will have particular personal value to educators." Dyer's biography is included in Contemporary Authors, volume 146, and in the New Revision Series, volume 91.
Ninth Letter is a literary magazine that publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. It is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of Art + Design and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Ninth Letter exists in two related but distinct forms: a biannual print magazine and a website that features new electronic content on a continuous basis. In 2004, the first issue was published. It included fiction from Pulitzer Prize recipient Robert Olen Butler, Katherine Vaz, and an interview with Yann Martel, the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi.
Cheryl Strayed is an American writer and podcast host. She has written four books: the novel Torch (2006) and the nonfiction books Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), Tiny Beautiful Things (2012) and Brave Enough (2015). Wild, the story of Strayed's 1995 hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, is an international bestseller and was adapted into the 2014 Academy Award-nominated film Wild.
Poe Ballantine is the pen name of Edwin Hughes, a fiction and nonfiction writer known for his novels and especially his essays, many of which appear in The Sun. His second novel, Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire, won Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year. The odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer that populate Ballantine’s work often draw comparisons to the life and work of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac.
The Best American Essays is a yearly anthology of magazine articles published in the United States. It was started in 1986 and is now part of The Best American Series published by HarperCollins. Articles are chosen using the same procedure with other titles in the Best American series; the series editor chooses about 100 article candidates, from which the guest editor picks 25 or so for publication; the remaining runner-up articles listed in the appendix. The series is edited by Robert Atwan, and Joyce Carol Oates assisted in the editing process until 2000 with the publication of The Best American Essays of the Century.
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.
Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Some of his work concerns his experience with neurological damage caused by a virus contracted in 1988.
Grace Schulman is an American poet. She received the 2016 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Society of America. In 2019, she was inducted as member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Janna Malamud Smith is an American non-fiction writer. She was born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1952, the second of two children born to Ann DeChiara Malamud and the writer Bernard Malamud. She grew up in Oregon, then in Bennington, Vermont, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her A.B. from Harvard University in 1973, majoring in American history and literature, and an M.S.W. in 1979 from Smith College. She practices and teaches psychotherapy in the Boston area. She is married to David Smith, and is the mother of two children.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is the 2012 memoir by the American writer, author, and podcaster Cheryl Strayed. The memoir describes Strayed's 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in 1995 as a journey of self-discovery. The book reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Wave: Life and Memories after the Tsunami is a memoir by the Sri Lankan educator Sonali Deraniyagala about the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. It was first published in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf. The book recounts the story of Deraniyagala's life before the tsunami struck the coast, and how it changed dramatically after the disaster, primarily focusing on life without her five most important family members, including her parents, her husband, and her two sons. It is written in the first-person narrative style and opens on December 26, 2004. The book received several awards and positive reviews from critics.
Mary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of five books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Academy in Berlin, a fellowship awarded to scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.
Ruth Whipple Crocker is an American writer and author of the memoir Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War, which began as a Pushcart Prize-nominated essay in O-Dark-Thirty.
Alden Jones is an American writer and educator. She is the author of memoirs The Wanting Was a Wilderness (2020) and The Blind Masseuse (2013) and the short story collection Unaccompanied Minors (2014). The Blind Masseuse was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogal Award for the Art of the Essay.
May-lee Chai is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. She is also currently a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Angela Morales is an American essayist, writer, and educator.
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.
David Lazar is an American writer and editor, primarily known as an essayist. Born in Brooklyn, NY, he has been involved in the development of "creative nonfiction" in the United States, creating graduate programs, writing theoretically about the essay, and mentoring and publishing many subsequent writers of note.
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.