Michelle Hoover

She was born in Ames, Iowa, but currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.[1] She was selected as the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University.[1] She was a MacDowell Fellow from the MacDowell Colony.[1][2] She has taught writing at Boston University and, since 2014, teaches at Brandeis University as the Fannie Hurst writer-in-residence.[3][4] She also teaches at GrubStreet, where she co-founded the Novel Incubator program.[4][5] She has an MFA from University of Massachusetts Amherst.[4] In 2014 she was selected as the National Endowment of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship.[2][4]

Hoover is a contributor to the Best New American Voices anthology.[1] She has also published short stories and novel excerpts in literary journals, including Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, StoryQuarterly, and The Massachusetts Review.[1] In 2005 she won the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction.

Her novel, The Quickening, was published in 2010 by Other Press (ISBN 978-1590513460). It was based on her own family history and a journal her grandmother, Melva Current, wrote during the Great Depression.[1][6][7] It was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, was a finalist for the Indies Choice Debut in 2010, was a finalist in the Literary Fiction category for Foreword Magazine's 2010 Book of the Year Awards,[8] and was a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read" pick.[3] Poets and Writers magazine picked The Quickening as one of its Top 5 Debut novels in 2010.[7]

Her second novel, Bottomland (ISBN 978-0802124715), was published on March 1, 2016, by Grove Press, Black Cat. It was chosen as the 2017 All Iowa Reads selection.[9]