Eileen Pollack was born and grew up in Liberty, N.Y., the heart of the Jewish Catskills, where her grandparents owned and operated a small hotel; her father was the town dentist and her mother taught third grade. One of the first two women to graduate from Yale with a BS in physics, Eileen later earned an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship.
Eileen is the author of the novels The Professor of Immortality (Delphinium Books, 2019), The Bible of Dirty Jokes (published in 2018), A Perfect Life, published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2016, and Paradise, New York (Temple University Press, 2000). Eileen’s novel Breaking and Entering, published in 2012 by Four Way Books, was awarded the 2012 Grub Street National Book Prize and named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection. The novel follows the experiences of Louise and Richard Shapiro, who, with their young daughter, Molly, move from ultra-liberal California to a quaint, rural town in the Midwest, only to discover that most of their neighbors belong to the Michigan Militia.
Eileen also is the author of two well-reviewed collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and Other Stories (Delphinium Books) and In the Mouth, which was published in 2008 by Four Way Books and named the winner of the 2008 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, presented annually to an American writer whose work of fiction is considered to have significance for the American Jew. In addition, the collection was shortlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish literature, chosen as a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Award, and awarded a silver medal in ForeWord Magazine’s 2008 Book of the Year Awards.
Eileen’s essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many periodicals. Her article “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, which was published in 2015 by Beacon Press. A collection of Eileen’s essays, Maybe It’s Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman, is forthcoming from Delphinium Books in January 2022.
Eileen’s innovative work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull won a 2003 WILLA finalist award and was made into a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain, Sam Rockwell, and Michael Greyeyes. Her groundbreaking textbook and anthology, Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style, with Readings, was published in 2009 by Wadsworth/Cengage.
Eileen has received fellowships from the NEA, the Michener Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, SubTropics, Agni, and New England Review. Her novella “The Bris” was chosen for the Best American Short Stories 2007 anthology, edited by Stephen King, while her 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 MQR. “Pigeons” was selected for the 2013 edition of the Best American Essays by Cheryl Strayed, who also selected “Righteous Gentile” for Best American Travel Writing 2018.
A longtime faculty member and former director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, Eileen now lives and writes in Boston.
Eileen has a column on writing at MEDIUM, which you can check out here.
Pollack’s Hotel, Ferndale, NY, from a postcard by Alfred Landis
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