WriterEileen Pollack

Eileen Pollack was born and grew up in Liberty, N.Y., the heart of the Jewish Catskills. A graduate of Yale University with a BS in physics, Eileen later earned an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship.

She is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic And Other Stories, a novel, Paradise, New York, and a work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull, which won a 2003 WILLA finalist award. A new collection of stories and novellas called In the Mouth is forthcoming in March 2008 from Four Way Books.

Her stories have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, SubTropics, Agni, and New England Review; her novella "The Bris" was chosen to appear in the Best American Short Stories 2007 anthology, edited by Stephen King.

She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her stories have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, the Cohen Award for best fiction of the year from Ploughshares, and similar awards from Literary Review and MQR.

She lives in Ann Arbor and is the Zell Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.