Amy Hempel

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Amy Hempel (born December 14, 1951) is an American short story writer, journalist, and university professor at Sarah Lawrence College. Hempel, who was born in Chicago, Illinois, is a former student of Gordon Lish, in whose workshop she wrote several of her first stories. Lish was so impressed with her work that he helped her publish her first collection, Reasons to Live (1985), which includes "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried", the first story she ever wrote. Originally published in TriQuarterly in 1983, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" is one of the most extensively anthologized stories of the last quarter century.

Hempel has produced three other collections: At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990), which includes the story “The Harvest”; Tumble Home (1997); and The Dog of the Marriage (2005). The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel (2006) gathers all the stories from the four earlier books. She co-edited (with Jim Shepard) Unleashed–Poems by Writers’ Dogs (1995), which includes contributions by Edward Albee, John Irving, Denis Johnson, Gordon Lish, Arthur Miller, and many others. She writes articles, essays, and short stories for such publications as Vanity Fair, Interview, Bomb, GQ, ELLE, Harper's Magazine, The Quarterly, and Playboy. Hempel has participated in The Juniper Summer Writing Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers.

Generally termed a minimalist writer, along with Raymond Carver and Mary Robison, Hempel is one of a handful of writers who has built a reputation based solely on short fiction. Chuck Palahniuk wrote of her work:

Every sentence isn't just crafted, it's tortured over. Every quote and joke, what Hempel tosses out comedian-style, is something funny or profound enough you'll remember it for years. The same way, I sense, Hempel has remembered it, held on to it, saved it for a place where it could really shine. Scary jewelry metaphor, but her stories are studded and set with these compelling bits. Chocolate chip cookies with no bland "cookie" matrix, just nothing but chips and chopped walnuts.

She lives in New York and, in addition to her duties at Sarah Lawrence, teaches fiction at The New School, in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Writing at Bennington College, and in the creative writing program at Princeton University.

In 2006 Hempel was awarded a USA Ford Fellow grant by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists.

Bibliography

Reasons to Live (1985)
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990)
Tumble Home (1997)
The Dog of the Marriage (2005)
The Collected Stories (2006)

References

External links

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Last updated on Friday July 25, 2008 at 18:30:12 PDT (GMT -0700)
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