Fiction Writer Eileen Pollack is Grisham Visiting Writer

Fiction writer Eileen Pollack reads selected passages from her best-selling novels Thursday (April 23) in the Grisham Visiting Writer Series at the University of Mississippi.  Pollack is the last Grisham Visiting Writer to speak during this year’s series. The free, public event is set for 7 p.m. at the Ole Miss-Oxford Depot.

Eileen Pollack

“It’s exciting to have Eileen Pollack coming to town; she is worth seeing in person,” said Gary Short, assistant professor of English and coordinator of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

Pollack is the author of the textbook and anthology “Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style, with Readings” (Wadsworth/Cengage, 2009). Her collection of stories and novellas, “In the Mouth” (Four Way Books, 2008), won the 2008 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which is presented annually to an American writer whose published fiction work is considered to have significance for the American Jew. It also was chosen as a finalist for the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish literature and ForeWord Magazine’s 2008 Book of the Year Awards.
Kirkus Review described Pollack’s “In the Mouth” as “delicate but dazzling” and praised it for its “incisive, beautifully crafted stories about family relationships, focused especially on the dynamic between fathers and daughters.”

Her novella “The Bris” was chosen to appear in the Best American Short Stories 2007 anthology, edited by Stephen King. Pollack’s 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 the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Pollack is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Iowa, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Michener Foundation, Rona Jaffe Foundation and Massachusetts Arts Council.

Pollack lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. She is the Zell Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

For more information or assistance related to a disability, contact Gary Short at gshort@olemiss.edu This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or 662-915-7439. For more information on the Department of English, go to http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/English/.