Eileen Pollack is a writer whose novel Breaking and Entering, about the deep divisions between blue and red America, was named a 2012 New York Times Editor’s Choice selection.

Eileen’s essay “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” was published in the Sunday, October 6, 2013, issue of The New York Times Magazine and went viral; the essay is an excerpt from her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still A Boys’ Club, published in 2015 by Beacon Press. 

A native of the Jewish Catskills, Eileen also is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes and Paradise, New York, as well as two collections of short fiction, In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic. Her innovative work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain, Sam Rockwell, and Michael Greyeyes. 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 in Boston and offers her services as a freelance editor and writing coach.

Eileen has a column on writing at MEDIUM, which you can check out here.

Eileen’s latest books:

A collection of Eileen’s hilarious yet heartbreaking essays, Maybe It’s Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman, was published in January 2022 from Delphinium Books.

Eileen’s thriller The Professor of Immortality (Delphinium Books) was released in October 2019; the paperback appeared in October 2020.

The Bible of Dirty Jokes (Four Way Books, 2018) is a raunchy comic murder mystery with a feisty female protagonist, set in the Catskills and Las Vegas. Think Amy Schumer meets The Sopranos.

A Perfect Life, a novel about love, medical research, and parenthood, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2017.