Eileen Pollack

Eileen Pollack graduated from Yale with a BS in physics and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novels The Professor of Immortality, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, and Breaking and Entering, which was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, as well as two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and In the Mouth, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Eileen’s work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was published in 2015; a long excerpt appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and went viral. Her work has been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Travel Writing. Her most recent book, an essay collection called Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman, was published in 2022 by Delphinium Books and received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus. A former director of the MFA Program at the University of Michigan, she now lives and writes in Boston.

Photo credit Michele McDonald.