Michele Herman

Michele Herman is a longtime writer of fiction, essays and poetry, with dozens of credits in publications including The New York Times, The Sun, Ploughshares and The Hudson Review. Her first novel, Save the Village, was published by Regal House in early 2022, about the same time as her second chapbook Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes (Finishing Line Press). In 2018 her first chapbook of poems, Victory Boulevard, was published by Finishing Line, and she won the New York Press Association Best Column award. She is a two-time winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and has placed in eight literary contests in recent years; among these she was semifinalist for the 2016 Raymond Carver Prize in fiction. She is a devoted longtime teacher of fiction, poetry and memoir at The Writers Studio. She is also an experienced developmental editor who has helped dozens of writers move from early drafts of their manuscripts to publishable books. Before she shifted her life in a literary direction, she earned a living as a freelance magazine feature writer, and had longtime relationships with Metropolis Magazine, Photo District News and many other publications. She is a columnist who has written scores of pieces about Greenwich Village life for The Villager and more recently for the new website The Village Sun. For fun, she has been translating the songs of Jacques Brel to make the words as lyrical and singable and mordant in English as they are in the original French, and she has received two Willis Barnstone Translation Prizes for these efforts. Occasionally she acts in community theater and performs her own work in the New York cabaret scene. Michele and her husband live in Greenwich Village, where they raised their two sons.