Marion Winik

Last updated
Marion Winik
Marion Winik 2024 Texas Book Festival.jpg
Winik at the 2024 Texas Book Festival.
Born1958 (age 6667)
NationalityAmerican
Education Brown University
Brooklyn College (MFA)
Occupations
  • Journalist
  • author

Marion Winik is an American journalist and author, best known for her work on NPR's All Things Considered . [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Winik was born in Manhattan in 1958 and grew up on the Jersey shore. She began writing poetry in 1969, at age 11. [2]

She graduated from Brown University in 1978, majoring in History and Semiotics, [3] and received her MFA from Brooklyn College in 1983. [4]

Career

In her childhood and early twenties, Winik focused on writing poetry, publishing two collections, Nonstop and Boycrazy. [5] Winik then began writing personal essays in the late 1980s, [2] which were published in The Austin Chronicle beginning in January 1989. [2] [6] These essays caught John Burnett's eye, who was an NPR reporter based in Austin, Texas at the time. He suggested that Winik work as a commentator for All Things Considered and her first piece was published there in 1991. [7] The following year, a literary agent contacted her, resulting in the 1994 publication of Telling, a collection of Winik's essays. [8]

A couple of years later in 1996, Winik published First Comes Love, a memoir about her marriage to Tony, who died of AIDS in 1994. [9] In her review of the book in the New York Times, Daphne Merkin wrote, "Marion Winik is resilient, hardy, unfazable; this self-described "suburban boho wannabe" is a frontier woman in disguise." [9]

A professor in the MFA program at the University of Baltimore since 2007, Winik writes "Bohemian Rhapsody," a monthly column at Baltimore Fishbowl.com. She is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle and reviews books for People, Newsday , The Washington Post , and Kirkus Reviews. Winik hosts The Weekly Reader podcast at WYPR. Her honors include an NEA Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction and the 2019 Towson Prize for literature.

Personal life

Winik met her husband, Tony, in New Orleans in 1983. [10] Although Tony was openly gay, they married and had two sons. [10] [11] He died from AIDS complications in 1994. [9]

Bibliography

Memoirs and essays

Poetry

As editor

References

  1. "Marion Winik: Personal Essays". NPR.org. 23 January 2007. Retrieved 2019-02-27.
  2. 1 2 3 Winik, Marion (July 2011). "A literary accounting: how I made my first million". Poets & Writers Magazine. 39 (4).
  3. "Marion Winik CV" (PDF). University of Baltimore.
  4. "Marion Winik's life story". marionwinik.com. Retrieved 2019-02-27.
  5. "Marion Winik NPR Commentator, Humorist, Memoirist". Red Brick Agency. 2013-01-28. Retrieved 2019-02-27.
  6. "Author Archives: Marion Winik". The Austin Chronicle . Retrieved 2019-03-01.
  7. "Marion Winik: Personal Essays". NPR.org. 23 January 2007. Retrieved 2019-03-01.
  8. Winik, Marion (1995). Telling: Confessions, Concessions, and Other Flashes of Light. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. ISBN   0679755225.
  9. 1 2 3 4 Merkin, Daphne (1996-06-09). "She Had to Have Him". The New York Times . Retrieved 2019-03-04.
  10. 1 2 Pate, Nancy (1997-08-10). "Bringing back memories". Boca Raton News . pp. 15A.
  11. Rose, Judy. "'First Comes Love' chronicles strange marriage". The Day. Knight-Riddler Newspapers. p. C8.
  12. Anderson, Lynne Christy (2011-02-01). "Review: In the Kitchen, by Dona Schwartz, Alison Nordstrom, and Marion Winik". Gastronomica. 11 (1): 117–118. doi:10.1525/gfc.2011.11.1.117. ISSN   1529-3262.
  13. Hazen, Elizabeth (2025-01-17). "Q&A with Marion Winik and Naomi Shihab Nye on 'I Know About a Thousand Things'". Baltimore Fishbowl. Retrieved 2025-08-25.