Lorrie Moore

Harman Writer-In-Residence, Spring 2000

Lorrie Moore, the distinguished fiction writer, will be the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence in Spring 2000. Ms. Moore is the author of two novels, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994) and Anagrams (1986), and has published three short story collections: Self-Help (1985); Like Life (1990); and Birds of America (1998), named by The New York Times as one of the Best Books of 1998 and nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. She is also the editor of the anthology I Know Some Things: Stories About Childhood by Contemporary Writers (1992).

Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s and The Paris Review, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999). They have won O. Henry Awards and the National Magazine Award for fiction.

Ms. Moore gives readings of her work in the United States and abroad, lectures on the short story, and has served as an editor for such literary magazines as Ploughshares, Mid-American Review, and Tri-Quarterly. She has judged numerous writing competitions, most recently the 1999 O. Henry Awards.

Born and raised in Glens Falls, New York, Ms. Moore graduated from St. Lawrence University summa cum laude, with highest honors in English, and received an MFA in fiction writing from Cornell University. She has been a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison since 1984. (December 1999)

“The trip and the story of the trip are two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say . . . The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.”

—From People Like That Are the Only People Here

Biographical Update

Lorrie Moore received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for writing in 2001; the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre, in 2004; the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction in 2005; and, in 2006, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ms. Moore was the editor of the 2004 edition of The Best American Short Stories series.

Her story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” was included in the 2005 anthology Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, edited by David Sedaris. Moore’s Collected Stories was published in 2008 in the United Kingdom. It included selections from each of her previously published collections, excerpts from her novel Anagrams, and three previously uncollected stories (first published in The New Yorker). Two new short stories, “Foes” and “Childcare,” have recently appeared in The Guardian UK and The New Yorker.

Her latest novel, A Gate at the Stairs, will be published in September 2009. (June 2009)