Eileen Pollack grew up in Liberty, N.Y., the heart of the Jewish Catskills. After graduating from Yale with a BS in physics, she earned an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of the novels The Professor of Immortality, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering (which won the Grub Street National Book Prize and was named a New York Times Editor's Choice selection), and Paradise, New York. She also is the author of two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and In the Mouth (which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award). Pollack'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; a long excerpt appeared in the Times Sunday Magazine and went viral. Pollack has received fellowships from the NEA, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her novella "The Bris" was chosen by Stephen King to appear in the Best American Short Stories 2007. Her essay "Pigeons" was selected by Cheryl Strayed for the 2013 edition of Best American Essays; "Righteous Gentile" appears in the 2018 edition of Best American Travel Writing. A long-time faculty member and former director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, she now lives and writes in Boston.
This biography was last updated on 01/25/2022.
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