Pamela Erens is the author The Understory (2007), winner of the Ironweed Press Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Erens’ second novel, The Virgins, was named a best book of 2013 by The New Yorker and The New Republic, and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. The New York Times called her next novel, Eleven Hours (2016), “one of the most realistic and harrowing portrayals of birth you are likely to encounter in fiction,” while NPR’s Fresh Air called it “fierce and vivid in its depiction of the exhaustion of the spirit and the rending of the flesh during childbirth. So much so, that it makes that boy adventure aboard Herman Melville’s Pequod almost seem like a Carnival cruise.” In 2021, Erens published her first book for middle grade readers, Matasha, followed in 2022 by Middlemarch and the Imperfect Life, her first volume of nonfiction, in which she writes about the personal and aesthetic influence of George Eliot’s classic novel. Erens’ fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, VQR, and other publications. She has taught writing at Middlebury and in the Tin House Craft Intensives workshop program.
Photo by Kathryn Huang