Michelle Herman is the author of the novels Missing and Dog, the collection of novellas A New and Glorious Life, the essay collection The Middle of Everything, and the Kindle Single Dream Life, a novella-length personal essay. Other essays and short fiction have appeared in American Scholar, O, the Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Her awards and honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James Michener Fellowship, numerous individual artist’s fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and two major teaching awards—the University Distinguished Teaching Award and the Rodica Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring—from Ohio State, where she has taught since 1988, and where she directs the Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Fine Arts as well as (as of summer 2012) the MFA Program in Creative Writing.  Her next book, Stories We Tell Ourselves, is due out from the University of Iowa Press in spring 2013.

A New Yorker by birth as well as temperament, she lives in Columbus with her husband, the painter Glen Holland. Their daughter, Grace, is a freshman at Wesleyan University.