Julie Orringer

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Julie Orringer is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a novel (Knopf, 2010), and How to Breathe Underwater, a short story collection (Knopf, 2003). Her stories have been published in The Yale Review, where they’ve twice been awarded the Editors’ Prize for best story of the year; the Paris Review, which awarded her the Discovery Prize in 1998; Ploughshares, which selected her work for the Cohen Award for Best Fiction; Zoetrope All-Story, which nominated her for a National Magazine Award; and the Washington Post Magazine. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction.

She is a 1996 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a two-year Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 1999-2001 and was Stanford’s Marsh McCall Lecturer in Fiction from 2001-2003. Her short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and the Northern California Book Award; it was a San Francisco Chronicle and LA Times Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book. Stories from the collection have been presented on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” and BBC Radio 4, have been read at the Steppenwolf Theater’s Stories on Stage, made into short films, and adapted into full-length plays presented by Word for Word Theater Company in San Francisco. The book has been translated into Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, and Italian. In 2006 it was selected for Stanford’s Three Books series, which made it required reading for all Stanford freshmen.

Orringer received a 2004-5 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for The Invisible Bridge. She continued work on the novel with the assistance of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony in the summers of 2005 and 2006, and from the Corporation of Yaddo in the summer of 2007. In 2006 she won the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers’ Award from the Jewish Community Foundation. Orringer has been the Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary’s College of California and California College of the Arts, and she was the Helen Herzog Zell Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. From 2008-09 she was the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and in the fall of 2009 she taught at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the writer Ryan Harty. She is currently at work on a novel about Varian Fry.