Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel

Born December 14, 1951 (1951-12-14) (age 57)
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Occupation Short story writer, essayist, journalist, professor
Nationality American
Genres Fiction

Amy Hempel (born December 14, 1951) is an American short story writer, journalist, and university professor at Brooklyn College.

Contents

[edit] Life

Hempel was born in Chicago, Illinois. She lives in New York and is Program Coordinator of the graduate Fiction-Writing Program at Brooklyn College.[1] Additionally, she teaches fiction at The New School, in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Writing at Bennington College,[2] and in the creative writing program at Princeton University.[3]

[edit] Career

Hempel is a former student of Gordon Lish, in whose workshop she wrote several of her first stories. Lish was so impressed with her work that he helped her publish her first collection, Reasons to Live (1985), which includes "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried", the first story she ever wrote.[4] Originally published in TriQuarterly in 1983, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" is one of the most extensively anthologized stories of the last quarter century.

Hempel has produced three other collections: At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), which includes the story “The Harvest”; Tumble Home (1997); and The Dog of the Marriage (2005). The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (2006) gathers all the stories from the four earlier books. She co-edited (with Jim Shepard) Unleashed–Poems by Writers’ Dogs (1995), which includes contributions by Edward Albee, John Irving, Denis Johnson, Gordon Lish, Arthur Miller, and many others. She writes articles, essays, and short stories for such publications as Vanity Fair, Interview, Bomb, GQ, ELLE, Harper's Magazine, The Quarterly, and Playboy. Hempel has participated in The Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers.

Generally termed a minimalist writer, along with Raymond Carver and Mary Robison, Hempel is one of a handful of writers who has built a reputation based solely on short fiction.

[edit] Awards

Hempel is a recipient of the Hobson Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006 she was awarded a USA Fellowship grant by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists. She won the Ambassador Book Award in 2007 for her Collected Stories, which was also named as one of the The New York Times' Ten Best Books of the year. In 2008 she won the Rea Award for the Short Story. In 2009 she won the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction with Alistair McLeod.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Reasons to Live (1985)
  • At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990)
  • Tumble Home (1997)
  • The Dog of the Marriage (2005)
  • The Collected Stories (2006)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Brooklyn College MFA Program; The Fiction-Writing Program, http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/graduate/mfa/fiction.htm 
  2. ^ "Core Faculty: Amy Hempel, Fiction". Low-Residency MFA in Writing: The Bennington Writing Seminars. Undated. http://www.bennington.edu/acad_grad_writ_fac_hempela.asp. Retrieved on 2007-10-29. 
  3. ^ "2007-08 Faculty". The Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. Undated. http://www.princeton.edu/~visarts/cwr/faculty.html. Retrieved on 2007-10-29. 
  4. ^ "" Forty-Eight Ways of Looking at Amy Hempel" by Dave Weich". Powells.com. April 27, 2006. http://www.powells.com/authors/hempel.html. Retrieved on 2007-10-15. 

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Hempel, Amy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Short story writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago, Illinois, United States
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Hempel"
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