Rivka Galchen

Galchen was born in Toronto, Canada. When she was an infant, her parents relocated to the United States, where she has lived ever since. She lived in Norman, Oklahoma from 1981 to 1994, where her father, Tzvi Gal-Chen, was a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and her mother was a computer programmer at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. Her parents, of Jewish descent, emigrated from Israel before her birth.

In 1994 Galchen began attending Princeton University, where she was an English major. In her sophomore year, she applied to an early-admissions program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from Mount Sinai in 2003, with a focus in psychiatry. After medical school, she received an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham fellow. She was a 2006 recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers.

In early 2011, Galchen served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Galchen has written for several national magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and The Believer.

Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, features a character with her father's name, Tzvi Gal-Chen. The character is a professor of meteorology and a fellow of the fictional Royal Academy of Meteorology. The novel was published in May 2008. The novel was a finalist for the Mercantile Library's 2008 John Sargent, Sr., First Novel Prize, the Canadian Writers' Trust's 2008 Fiction Prize, and the 2008 Governor General's Award.

Galchen teaches writing at Columbia University and is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine.

In 2010 Galchen was chosen by The New Yorker as one of its "20 Under 40".

Galchen's short-story collection, American Innovations, was published in 2014. The collection was longlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize and awarded the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.