Annie Dillard

The eldest of her parents’ three daughters, Annie Doak grew up in a section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the post-war period. There, she attended a girls’ preparatory school and was a member of the Presbyterian church. She spent several summers of her youth away at church-sponsored summer camps. As a child, she was an avid reader, painter, and collector of natural objects such as rocks and insects. She attended Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she studied English, creative writing, and theology, and where she met and married her first husband, creative writing professor Richard Dillard. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Hollins College in 1967 and 1968, respectively, after which she embarked on her literary career with the publication of her first collection of poetry, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, in 1974, quickly followed by her seminal, Pulitzer-prize work of literary nonfiction, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She and Richard Dillard divorced in 1975, after which she left Virginia for a literary residency at Western Washington University in Washington state. There, she met and married her second husband, with whom she had a daughter in 1984. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Dillard wrote and published literary nonfiction, essays, two novels, and a book of experimental poetry, as well as teaching creative writing at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, which she won for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard received a PEN award for a collection of essays and a National Humanities Medal for her entire body of work.