Name Goldie Goldbloom | Role Novelist | |
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Books The Paperbark Shoe, You Lose These Plus Other Stories | ||
Parshat Chayei Sarah: Rebecca meets Isaac
Goldie Goldbloom (born October 3, 1964) is an Australian novelist and short story writer. Her novel The Paperbark Shoe won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Fiction in 2008. The novel also won Literary Novel of the Year from the ForeWord Magazine (Independent Publishers) in 2011. Goldie also received a Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award in 2010.
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Additionally, she is an LGBT activist working on behalf of queer Orthodox Jews. She is a former board member of Eshel and is the creator of the international blog, Frum Gay Girl, where she interviews Orthodox LGBT Jews and their allies.
Early life and education
Goldbloom was born in Perth, Western Australia. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. She is a member of the Lubavitch chassidic community. Her grandmother was the West Australian writer Dorrit Hunt, who was made a Life Member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers in 1988.
Career
Goldbloom began writing fiction seriously in her forties, after the birth of her eight children, and in 2011, received the Simon Blattner Fellowship in Creative Writing and World Literature from Northwestern University, following the publication of her novel, The Paperbark Shoe. She then began teaching at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
Goldbloom's work has been published in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Le Monde and Story Quarterly, among other places. In 2015, one of her stories was selected for inclusion in the Best Australian Short Stories. She was an early contributor to G-dcast, and has written for NPR. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have been selected for 'Keep Your Wives Away From Them (Golden Crown Literary Award, 2011), Inspired Journeys and over a dozen other anthologies.
In 2011, Goldbloom was the Chicago Reader’s Jewish Writer of the Year.
In 2013, she spoke at the International Forum on the Novel, run by Villa Gillet in Lyon, France, on the subject of "Portraits and Faces: Appearance and Disfigurment". Later the same year, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing.
Goldbloom received a Brown Foundation Fellowship at Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France in 2014 and won Hunger Mountain's National Nonfiction Award in the same year. In 2016, the City of Chicago awarded her a Individual Artist Grant and in 2017, Ragdale selected her for an artist's residency.