Eileen Pollack

Fiction Writer, Creative Nonfiction Writer

Watertown, MA
Massachusetts US

Author's Bio

Eileen Pollack was one of the first two women to graduate from Yale University with a BS in physics; she later earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novels The Professor of Immortality, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, and Breaking and Entering, which won the Grub Street National Book Prize was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, as well as two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and In the Mouth, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Eileen’s work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was published by Beacon Press in 2015; a long excerpt appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and went viral, after which she spent five years touring the United States, working to advance the opportunities for women and people of color in STEM fields. Her work has been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Travel Writing. Her most recent book is an essay collection entitled Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman, which received starred reviews in Kirkus and PW. The former director of the MFA Program at the University of Michigan, she is now a professor emerita and lives and writes in Boston.

 

Publications & Prizes

Creative Nonfiction

Books:
Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Style and Content (Thomson Wadsworth, 2008)
,
Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Sitting Bull and Catherine Weldon (University of New Mexico Press, 2002)

Fiction

Anthologies:
Best American Short Stories 2007 (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
,
Between Mothers and Sons (Scribner, 2007)
,
God: Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)
,
Pushcart Prize Anthology XX (Pushcart Press, 1996)
,
Pushcart Prize Anthology XVI (Pushcart Press, 1992)
Books:
Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books, 2012)
,
In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas (Four Way Books, 2007)
,
Paradise, New York (Temple University Press, 1998)
,
The Rabbi in the Attic & Other Stories (Delphinium Books, 1991)

More Information

Gives readings: 
Yes
Travels for readings: 
Yes
Identifies as: 
Jewish
Prefers to work with: 
Any
Fluent in: 
English
Born in: 
New York, NY
New York
Raised in: 
Liberty, NY
New York
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Last update: Jan 24, 2024