Michelle Herman (born March 9, 1955, in
Brooklyn, New York) is an American writer and Professor Emerita of English at
Ohio State University. Her most widely known work is the novel Dog, which
WorldCat shows in 545 libraries[1] and has been translated into multiple languages. She has also written the novel Missing, which was awarded the Harold Ribalow Prize for Jewish fiction, and Close-Up, which won the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. She is married to Glen Holland, a still life painter. They have a daughter.[2]
Biography
Herman received a B.S. from
Brooklyn College and an M.F.A. from the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, after which she was a James Michener Fellow. She taught from 1988 until 2022 at the
Ohio State University, where she was a founder of both the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and an interdisciplinary graduate program in the arts.
She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and many grants from the Ohio Arts Council and Greater Columbus Arts Council in addition to her James Michener Fellowship.[3]
In addition to her novels, she has published a collection of
short fiction, A New and Glorious Life.[4] "Auslander," which appears in the collection was also included in American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories by
Gerald Shapiro[5] and other anthologies.
She has published three essay collections, the autobiographical The Middle of Everything, as well as two volumes of personal essays, Stories We Tell Ourselves[6][7] and Like A Song. A new essay collection is forthcoming from
Galileo Press.
Roberta Maierhofer viewed Herman's novel Missing as a literary gerontology example of the process of redefining one's self in advancing age.[8]
Bibliography
Herman, Michelle. Close-Up. Columbus: DLJ Press/Columbus State University Press, 2022.
ISBN978-0578905280
Herman, Michelle. Devotion. San Francisco: Outpost19, 2016.
ISBN978-1944853112
Herman, Michelle. Like A Song. San Francisco: Outpost19, 2015.
ISBN978-1073557783
Herman, Michelle. The Middle of Everything: Memoirs of Motherhood. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005.
ISBN9780803224261
Herman, Michelle. Dog: A Short Novel. San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage Pub, 2005.
ISBN9781596921115
Translated by Fenisia Giannini into Italian as La mia vita con PhilISBN9788884908698
Herman, Michelle. Missing. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990.
ISBN9780814205037
Herman, Michelle. A New and Glorious Life: Novellas. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998.
ISBN9780887482847 (contains: "A New and Glorious Life", "Auslander", and "Hope Among Men")
Herman, Michelle. Stories We Tell Ourselves (contains "Dream Life" and "Seeing Things") Univ. of Ohio Press, 2013.
ISBN978-1-60938-153-0
^Maierhofer, Roberta (1999). "Desperately Seeking the Self: Gender, Age, and Identity in Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle and Michelle Herman's Missing". Educational Gerentology. 25 (2): 129–141.
doi:
10.1080/036012799267918.