Michelle Herman
Michelle Herman is the author of the novels Missing, Dog, and Devotion, the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, and three collections of personal essays—The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song—as well as a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life. Her most recent book, Close-Up, was released by Columbus State University of Georgia Press in 2022.
Kirkus, in praise of Close-Up, wrote: “Good things can happen to lonely hearts and wounded families. . . . Fans of both Ann Patchett and Anne Tyler are likely to enjoy this satisfying, unhurried novel.”
Herman has been awarded fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Copernicus Foundation, the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award. She has received two major teaching awards: the University Distinguished Teaching Award and the Rodica Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring from Ohio State.
Herman spoke with The Journal about the Non/Fiction Collection Prize, the hybrid nature of fiction and creative nonfiction, and the importance of the prose collection. She shared advice on language for a successful prose collection: “One is evidence of the writer being in love with the musicality of language and really interested in the way language is used… I read published books all the time—or rather, I begin to read published books and then shut them with a bang—if the words I’m encountering were not chosen with great care, no matter how deeply held and persuasive a belief or an idea or how vividly imagined a world. Language is our medium. If it’s used casually, if it’s used without love, without joy and precision and wonder, then it seems to me the medium isn’t the right one for the message.” The full interview can be found here.
Herman’s essays and short fiction have appeared in The Sun, Columbus Monthly, American Scholar, O, the Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, Creative Nonfiction, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, and many other journals.
She received her B.S. from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, after which she was a James Michener Fellow. Herman has taught at Ohio State since 1988 and was a founder of the M.F.A. program in creative writing. She founded and directs a graduate interdisciplinary program across the arts at OSU and is the executive and artistic director of an all-scholarship, in-residence summer writing program on campus for teenagers who live in Columbus, Ohio, and attend Columbus City Schools. She has served as an Advisory Editor for The Journal with Kathy Fagan.
A New Yorker by birth, education, and temperament, for many years Herman was born in Brighton Beach. She lives with her husband, the artist Glen Holland, in Columbus, Ohio. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Ohio State, sings in a 500-voice community choir known as the Harmony Project, takes many hours of ballet classes each week, and sometimes participates in experimental dance/theater performances with the FluxFlow Dance Project. She writes an advice column called “Care and Feeding” for Slate every Sunday.
Updated June 2022