Tara Ison

Ison received her MFA in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College, where she was a student of Rick Moody.[4] Institutions she has taught creative writing and screenwriting at include Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Goddard College and Antioch University Los Angeles. In addition, she has taught UC Riverside Palm Desert's MFA in Creative Writing program. Presently, she is a Professor of English at Arizona State University.[5]

Work by Ison has appeared in Tin House, Salon,[6] O, The Oprah Magazine,[7] Electric Literature,[4] The Kenyon Review,[8] The Rumpus,[9] Nerve, Black Clock, TriQuarterly,[10] The Santa Monica Review, PMS: poemmemoirstory, Publishers Weekly,[11][12] The Week, The Mississippi Review, LA Weekly,[13] the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune,[14] the San Jose Mercury News, and numerous anthologies.

She is also the co-writer, with Neil Landau, of the 1991 cult classic movie Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead.[15] The pair had originally written the script in 1987.[16]

Ison is the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships in 2020 and 2008, and a 2008 COLA Individual Artist Grant, as well as multiple Yaddo fellowships, a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for International Study, a Brandeis National Women's Committee Award, a Thurber House Fiction Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, the Simon Blattner Fellowship from Northwestern University, and a California Arts Council Artists' Fellowship Award.

Cover of Reeling Through Life

• Ball: Stories
• Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies' Winner, 2015 PEN Southwest Award for Creative Nonfiction[17]
• A Child out of Alcatraz
• The List
• Rockaway

• Official website