EJ LEVY

Levy was born in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and earned a Bachelor’s degree in History from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. For a decade, she worked as an editor and environmental activist, founding a lesbian and gay newspaper for northern New Mexico and later serving as Managing Editor of The Independent Film & Video Monthly, a national magazine for independent film and video makers based in Manhattan, before returning to the southwest as Outreach Director for Amigos Bravos, a river-protection organization. She earned an M.F.A. in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction from Ohio State University in 2002. She has been a Visiting Writer at Colorado College and on the M.F.A. faculty at American University in Washington, D.C., where she taught for four years before returning to the Midwest to teach at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

She has received a Pushcart Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, a Nelson Algren Award, a Chicago Literary Award, a Gesell Award, a Michener Fellowship, and an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award, among other prizes, and her fiction has twice been named among the year’s notable in the Best American Short Stories series published by Houghton Mifflin. She has received many grants, fellowships, and residencies, including the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship to Bread Loaf, a Loft-McKnight Award, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Fellowship, the Goldfarb Family Fellowship, and fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Cottages at Hedgebrook, Wurlitzer Foundation, The Millay Colony, and Sacatar Foundation, among others.

She is the editor of Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, which won the Lambda Literary Award.

Her recently released environmental memoir, Amazons: A Love Story, was described by Kirkus as “a beautiful memoir…by a talented writer”; her short story collection, Love, In Theory, won the Flannery O’Connor Award and was published in September, 2012; it has been called “a brilliant debut” by best-selling author Cheryl Strayed and “richly worthy of Flannery O’Connor’s name” by Pulitzer-prize winner Robert Olen Butler.

She lives with her partner in Virginia, and teaches nonfiction at Colorado State University.  To learn more, visit www.ejlevy.com

Link to what E.J. has to share about her classes