On Immunity (Biss) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1977-78
• Raised—upstate New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Hampshire College; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award; Pushcart Prize; Carl Sandberg Award
• Currently—lives in Evanston, Illinois


Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer and the founder of Essay Press where she is also an editor. She teaches, as an artist in residence, at Northwestern University.

Personal
Rasied in upstate New York, Biss earned a bachelor's degree in non-fiction writing from Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. After graduation, she moved to New York City, teaching in public schools—an experience that profoundly influenced her writing. In 2003, she moved to Iowa City to complete her MFA in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. She teaches at Northwestern University.

She and her husband John Bresland live with their son in Evanston, Illinois. She and Bresland are also in a band called STET Everything.

Writing
Biss published her first book Balloonist, a collection of prose poems, in 2002. Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, her second book, came out in 2009, winning the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She published her third book On Immunity: An Inoculation in 2014. It was named one of the New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2014" and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Biss won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/20/2015.)