Michelle Hoover

professor, writing, Boston University

Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Grub Street and at Boston University, and her short fiction has been published in numerous collections and literary journals including *Confrontation*, *The Massachusetts Review*, *Prairie Schooner*, and *Best New American Voices*. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholar and the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 she won the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Called "innovative" by* Poets & Writers* magazine and selected as one of their debut fiction picks of 2010, *The Quickening* explores the lives of two farm women, struggling to carve out a life for themselves and for their families as the Great Depression and the rugged Midwestern land threaten to snatch it from them.*The Quickening* has received a starred review from *Publisher's Weekly*, rare for a debut novel, and bestselling author Margot Livesey has praised Hoover's first work as "such a fully realized, sensually vivid, psychologically intelligent novel that it's hard to believe it is a debut, but it is and a sparkling one."