Sigrid Nunez

Biography

Sigrid Nunez is the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. She was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Columbia University. After finishing school she worked for a time as an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books. She has taught at Princeton University, Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University and the New School, and has been a visiting writer at Baruch College, Washington University, Vassar College and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and of several other writers' conferences across the United States. She lives in New York City.

Work

Nunez is the author of six novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, The Last of Her Kind, and Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including four Pushcart Prize volumes and four volumes of Asian American literature. Among the journals she has contributed to are The New York Times, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Believer, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, and O: The Oprah Magazine.

Nunez's major preoccupations as a novelist have been language, memory, identity, class, and writing itself. She was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in spring, 2005. Among her other honors are a Whiting Award and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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