Quick Facts
Biography
Alice McDermott (born June 27, 1953) is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities.
Life
McDermott was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975, and received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.
She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker and Seventeen. She has also published articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children. She is Catholic, though she once deemed herself "not a very good Catholic."
Awards and honors
- That Night (1987) — finalist for the National Book Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize
- At Weddings and Wakes (1992) — finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
- Charming Billy (1998) — winner of an American Book Award (1999) and the National Book Award
- Child of My Heart : A Novel (2002) — nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
- After This (2006) — finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
- Someone (2013) - longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award Fiction
- 1987 Whiting Award
- 2013 Inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.
- 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award fiction shortlist for Someone
- 2014 Finalist for Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Works
- ; reprint 21 November 2013
- ; reprint 21 February 2005
- ; reprint 24 November 2009
- ; reprint 24 November 2009
- Child of My Heart, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002; 2013, ISBN 9781408806678
- ; reprint 25 September 2007
- "These Short, Dark Days." The New Yorker. 24 Aug. 2015: 58-65. Print.