Laurie Stone's Biography

Laurie Stone is author of the novel Starting with Serge (Doubleday), the memoir collection Close to the Bone (Grove), and Laughing in the Dark (Ecco), a collection of her writing on comic performance. A longtime writer for the Village Voice (1975-99), she has been theater critic for The Nation, critic-at-large on National Public Radio's Fresh Air, a member of The Bat Theater Company, and a regular writer for Ms., New York Woman, and Viva. She has received grants from The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Kittredge Foundation, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Saltonstall Art Colony, Djerassi Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, and in 1996 she won the Nona Balakian prize in excellence in criticism from the National Book Critics Circle. She has published numerous memoir essays in such publications as Ms., TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, Threepenny Review, Speakeasy, and Creative Nonfiction. Her short fiction and nonfiction appears in the anthologies Writers at Work (2008) The Other Woman (2007), Best New Writing of 2007, It's So You: 35 Women Write About Personal Expression Through Fashion and Style (2007), Full Frontal Fiction (Crown, 2000) and Money, Honey (Deutscher Tashenbuch Verlag, 2000). Her reviews can be seen in the L.A. Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. She has given readings in dozens of venues, including The 92nd Street Y, Dixon Place, The Poetry Project, Barnes & Noble, KGB, The National Arts Club, and The New School. She has served as writer-in-residence at Pratt Institute, Old Dominion University, Thurber House, and Muhlenberg College. She has been a member of the faculty of Antioch University's Masters in Creative Writing Program, taught in the Graduate Theater Department of Sarah Lawrence, been a member of the faculty at Ohio State University, Fordham University, Southern Maine's Stonecoast Writers' Conference, and taught at the Paris Writers Workshop and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. She has had short residencies and given workshops at many other universities, including CalArts, Trinity College, The University of North Texas, ArtCenter in Pasadena, Mills College, Indiana University, University of Connecticut, Yale University, and School of the Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1993 and 2001 she received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts in the category of Nonfiction Literature. She served on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle and as a core faculty member of Fairleigh Dickinson University's MFA in creative writing. She recently did residencies at Yaddo, Saltonstall, Ragdale, Djerassi, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She participated in "Novel: An Installation," living in a house designed by the architecture firm Salazar Davis and working on a novel in Flux Factory's gallery space. Last spring she was included in the "Living Writers Series" at Muhlenberg College. She is currently at work on My Life as an Animal, a Memoir in Stories and Unmarked Trail: a Romance in Stories and a Guide to Setting up a Writing Partnership in collaboration with Richard Toon.