About

Michelle Herman’s newest book is the novel All the Time in the World – the middle-grade time-travel story she never expected to write. Her most recent (2025) book for adults is the memoir-in-essays If You Say So.

The author of three earlier memoirs and essay collections – The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song – as well as four novels (Missing, Dog, Devotion, and Close-Up), the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, and the advice book for children, A Kid’s Guide to Life, her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Sun, American Scholar, O, the Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and many other journals. Her awards and honors include numerous individual artist’s fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Copernicus Foundation, the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, 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 taught for over three decades and was a founder of the MFA program in creative writing in the early 1990s. She also founded and directed, until her retirement from teaching in 2022, a graduate interdisciplinary program across the arts and an all-scholarship, in-residence summer writing program for teenage writers in Ohio. Since her retirement, she has mentored incarcerated writers, provided pro bono college application advising to first-generation and immigrant and refugee high school students, and devoted countless hour to dance and performance. A New Yorker by birth (and temperament), born in Brighton Beach and educated in New York City public schools and at Brooklyn College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has lived for many years in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, the painter Glen Holland, but they are in the process of decamping for New York. Their daughter, Grace, is long grown; her mother stays active in the parenting realm by offering advice to other parents weekly on Slate.

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…or singing with her longtime best friend Hula, performing as the duo Foreign Excellent

…or performing, on stage or on film, with FluxFlow Dance Project.

Listen to The Harmony Project, a community choir of 500 voices as well as an arts, education, and volunteer service organization in Columbus, Ohio – of which Michelle has been a proud member since 2011. “Swing Low” and “Signed, Sealed & Delivered” recorded on December 2, 2014 at the Ohio Theater.

Author photographs by Leiland Charles.