Nearly Perfect Copy (Amend) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—September 04, 1972 (guesstimate)
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford Uiversity; M.F.A., Iowa
   Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Allison Amend was born in Chicago, Illinois, on a day when the Cubs beat the Mets 2-0. In high school, she lived for a year with a Spanish family in Barcelona and now speaks fluent Catalan. She attended Stanford University, and, though she dropped out three times, managed to graduate with honors in Comparative Literature. She spent her junior year pretending to attend the Sorbonne in Paris.

After college, she returned to France on a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship in Lyon, where she taught high school English and mistranslated documents for the Lyon Opera. Allison then attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, receiving a Maytag and a Teaching/Writing Fellowship. While there, she learned never to live downwind from a pig farm and how to put English on the cue ball.

Allison’s debut short story collection, Things That Pass for Love (2008) won a bronze Independent Publisher’s award. Stations West, a historical novel, was published by Louisiana State University Press as part of its Yellow Shoe Fiction series in March 2010 and was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Oklahoma Book Award.

Her second novel, A Nearly Perfect Copy was published in 2013.

Allison lives in New York City, where she teaches creative writing at Lehman College in the Bronx and for Red Earth MFA. (From the author's website .)