Patricia T. O'Conner | |
---|---|
Born | Des Moines, Iowa, U.S. | February 19, 1949
Occupation | Author |
Nationality | American |
Education | Grinnell College (BA) University of Minnesota |
Spouse | Stewart Kellerman |
Patricia T. O'Conner (born February 19, 1949) [1] is the author of five books about the English language. A former staff editor at The New York Times Book Review , [2] she has appeared regularly as a language commentator for WNYC [3] and Iowa Public Radio. [4] She has written extensively for The New York Times , including book reviews, [5] [6] [7] [8] On Language columns, [9] [10] [11] and articles for the op-ed page [12] and the Week in Review [13] section. Her work has also appeared in Smithsonian , [14] The Paris Review , [15] the Literary Review [16] [17] [18] [19] (London), and other publications.
A native of Des Moines, Iowa, [20] [21] she graduated from Grinnell College in 1971 with a BA in philosophy and received an honorary degree from Grinnell in 2006. [22] She did graduate work in urban journalism at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, before beginning her career as a reporter and editor in 1973. [22] After several years at The Des Moines Register and The Wall Street Journal , she joined the New York Times in 1982. [22]
She and Stewart Kellerman, her husband [23] and co-author of several books and articles, answer questions about the English language on The Grammarphobia Blog. [24]
Grinnell College is a private liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. It was founded in 1846 when a group of New England Congregationalists established Iowa College. It has an open curriculum, which means students need not follow a prescribed list of classes. The college's 120-acre campus includes several listings on the National Register of Historic Places.
"May you live in interesting times" is an English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse. The expression is ironic: "interesting" times are usually times of trouble.
"Hair of the dog", short for "hair of the dog that bit you", is a colloquial expression in the English language predominantly used to refer to alcohol that is consumed as a hangover remedy. Many other languages have their own phrase to describe the same concept. The idea may have some basis in science in the difference between ethanol and methanol metabolism.
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.
Amy Clampitt was an American poet and author.
Patricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.
Edward Leslie Mayo was an American poet, English professor, and author.
Sarah Gambito is an American poet and professor. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Loves You, Delivered, and Matadora. Her first collection, Matadora, was a New England/New York Award winner and won the 2005 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry.
Ruth Suckow was an American writer from Iowa. She wrote novels and stories.
Paul Harding is an American musician and author, best known for his debut novel Tinkers (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2010 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, among other honors. He is currently the director of the Creative Writing and Literature MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton, as well as Interim Associate Provost of Stony Brook University's Lichtenstein Center.
Pictures from the Water Trade: An Englishman in Japan (1985) — published in the US as Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan — is a novel by John David Morley, a cultural investigation of Japan in the 1970s.
This list comprises widespread modern beliefs about English language usage that are documented by a reliable source to be misconceptions.
Ann Fisher was an English grammarian and successful author of several books. With A New Grammar (1745), she became the first woman to publish on modern English grammar, although Elizabeth Elstob had published a grammar of Anglo-Saxon in 1715. She was also the first woman to publish an English dictionary, and the first grammarian to suggest that masculine pronouns be used generically. Her daughter Sarah inherited and ran The Newcastle Chronicle which she co-founded.
Sterling Lord was an American literary agent, editor, and author. His clients included Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Howard Fast, Jimmy Breslin, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.
J. Ann Selzer is an American political pollster who is the president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based polling firm Selzer & Company, which she founded in 1996. Her polls of Iowa voters have a reputation for being highly accurate, based on their performance in major elections from 2008 through 2020. She has been described as "the best pollster in politics" by Clare Malone of FiveThirtyEight, which also gives Selzer & Company a rare A+ grade for accuracy.
A Lot To Ask: A Life of Barbara Pym is a 1990 biography of the English novelist Barbara Pym. The author, Hazel Holt, worked with Pym in the 1950s at the International African Institute in London before embarking on her own literary career. The pair remained friends, and Holt functioned as Pym's literary executor after the latter's death from breast cancer in 1980.
Amy Namowitz Worthen is an American printmaker, engraver, curator, art historian of prints and author. She is the Emerita Curator of Prints at the Des Moines Art Center.
Stewart Kellerman is an American author, journalist, and blogger who has reported on wars in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. A former editor at The New York Times and foreign correspondent for United Press International, he has covered conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Argentina, Uruguay, Israel, and the Arab world.
Bruna Dantas Lobato is a fiction writer and translator of Brazilian literature. Her translation of The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel won the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Her translation of The Dark Side of Skin by Jeferson Tenório won an English PEN Translates Award, and her translation of Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu was longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.