Quick Facts
Biography
Laura Kasischke (born 1961) is an American fiction writer and poet. She is best known for writing the novels Suspicious River, The Life Before Her Eyes and White Bird in a Blizzard, all of which have been adapted to film.
Life and work
She was born at Grand Rapids, Michigan. Kasischke attended the University of Michigan (MFA 1987) and Columbia University. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son.
She is also currently Allan Seager Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature, and of the Residential College at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Kasischke's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series.
Her novel The Life Before Her Eyes is the basis for the film of the same name, directed by Vadim Perelman, and starring Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood. Kasischke's work is particularly well received in France, where she is widely read in translation. Her novel A moi pour toujours (Be Mine) was published by Christian Bourgois, and was a national best seller.
Awards
Kasischke was awarded the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for Space, In Chains. Her work has received the Juniper Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Prize, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley Award. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes. In 2005 she was The Frost Place poet in residence and in 2009 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Creative Arts - Poetry