Debra Spark is the author of six books of fiction, including, most recently, Unknown Caller, The Pretty Girl, and Good for the Jews. Other books include two essay collections on fiction writing (Curious Attractions and And Then Something Happened) and the anthology Twenty Under Thirty. Spark has published numerous articles, book reviews, short stories, essays, travel articles, food articles, and op-eds in publications like Agni, the Boston Globe, the Cincinnati Review, the Chicago Tribune, Epoch, Esquire, Five Points, Food and Wine, Harvard Review, the Huffington Post, Maine Magazine, Narrative, New England Travel and Life, the New England Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Yale Alumni Magazine, and Yankee, among other places. For a decade, she had a side specialty in writing about art, home and design for magazines like Décor, Dwell, Elysian, Interiors, New England Home, Maine Home+Design, and Down East, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Maine Humanities Council “One State/One Read” program, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, a Wisconsin Institute Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a professor at Colby College and has taught in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1996. She lives north of Portland, Maine.
