Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore was born in Glens Falls, a small town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, in 1957. She majored in English at St. Lawrence University, during which time she won Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest at the age of 19. After college, she worked as a paralegal in Manhattan for two years, then enrolled in Cornell University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Moore realized, while studying at Cornell, that her two creative interests—writing and music—had begun to compete for her attention, so she gave up piano to focus on writing stories and soon began to have those stories accepted by magazines including Fiction International and StoryQuarterly. Upon graduating from Cornell, Moore secured a literary agent and quickly sold her first collection of short fiction, Self-Help, at the age of 26. Moore has since published three more short story collections, three novels, an essay collection, and a children’s book, and has won various prizes including the O. Henry Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for 30 years before joining the faculty at Vanderbilt University in 2013, serving as the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English.