Elizabeth McCracken
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Elizabeth McCracken is a novelist, short-story writer, and former public librarian. She is the author of the short-story collection Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry: Stories (Turtle Bay Books, 1993) and the novels The Giant’s House: A Romance (Dial Press,1996) and Niagara Falls All Over Again (Dial Press, 2001). She recently published her first book of nonfiction, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir (Little, Brown, 2008). An itinerant teacher of creative writing, she has taught at Skidmore College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, among other places.
At the Radcliffe Institute, McCracken will work on her third novel, tentatively titled “Thunderstruck Not Lightning-struck,” and on a second collection of short stories, “The House of Two Three-Legged Dogs.” The novel is narrated by a female athlete named Christian Wrede who trains as a weight-lifting prodigy under the tutelage of her dentist father, also named Christian Wrede.
McCracken has won grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Michener-Copernicus Society of America. Her fiction has won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, a Salon Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize and has been a finalist for the National Book Award. She is married to the novelist and artist Edward Carey.
