No-frills bio
I'm the author of two collections,
The Sweetheart Is In, and
Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions, and the recently published
The Adventures of Cancer Bitch,
based on my
blog. I grew up in Houston and live in Chicago. My M.F.A. is in fiction from the University of Iowa
Writers' Workshop; my B.S. is in journalism from the
Medill School of Journalism. I was a reporter for the
Miami Herald and I've published prose and poetry in
The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tikkun, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review and many other places. I've had work in anthologies, most recently in
Rules of Thumb: 73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations (Writer's Digest) and
Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton). I've had work more or less recently in
Lilith,
River Teeth,
Fourth Genre, the Pinch, Crab Orchard Review and Colorado Review. Fiction is forthcoming in
Prairie Schooner and the
Seattle Review. I'm the creative nonfiction editor of
Another Chicago Magazine and co-director of
Northwestern's M.A./M.F.A. in Creative Writing program. I also teach in the University of Chicago's Graham School of General Studies, in the
certificate program in creative writing. I've received a
Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the
Illinois Arts Council,
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. In October 2007 I was the graduate faculty recipient of the 2006-2007 Distinguished Teaching Award, presented by Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies. In 2007 I was a blogger (one of many) for
The Huffington Post. E-mail me at slwisenberg (at) sbcglobal.net.
Some-frills bio
I am a third-generation native Texan on my mother's side. I was a substitute portrait artist at an amusement park, Astro World. Despite the worst grades of my life senior year in college, I was accepted into the
Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. Nobody was talking about "creative nonfiction" back in those days. I think I was accepted because I submitted a short story written in the second person, and this was before Jay McInerney used it in
Bright Lights, Big City. I studied fiction, worked for newspapers, wrote fiction, did journalism, and so on and so forth. I also have written book reviews, though I don't have the right kind of mind that makes it easy to write them. I spent three wonderful summers teaching journalism
cherubs at Northwestern. I spent three other wonderful summers getting educated by Uncle Sam in the National Endowment for the Humanities'
summer seminars. I have taught at Northwestern, DePaul, School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
Ragdale, and
Roosevelt. I've published graphic art in the Chicago Tribune and Crain's Chicago Business.
