Biography

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fourteen books.  Her latest novel, Traveling with Spirits, will appear in Fall, 2013.  Other novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department.  Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage. In 2002, The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir was a Finalist for the PEN USA Creative Non-Fiction Award.  Abundant Light was a 2005 Fiction Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.

Valerie Miner's work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Conditions, The T.L.S., The Women's Review of Books, The Nation and other journals.  Her stories and essays are published in more than sixty anthologies.  Her collaborative work includes books, museum exhibits as well as theatre.  A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4.

She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources.  She has received Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia, India and Indonesia.

Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is now a professor and artist in residence at Stanford University.  She travels internationally giving readings, lectures, and workshops.  She and her partner live in San Francisco and Mendocino County, California.

Teaching Responsibilities

Valerie Miner enjoys working with story writers and novelists and nonfiction writers employing a range of styles. She is especially interested in the rhythms of language, the shape of fictions and in strategies about narrative alternatives. Her classes and exchanges are highly interactive and involve a mix of manuscript critique, craft tutorial, reading of international fiction and discussion of the vocation of a writing life. Students consider how the stories we write/read are related to the world around us. She approaches fiction and literary nonfiction with an eye to what keeps us aesthetically stimulated, emotionally engaged and socially connected. She's most interested in helping students find their own voices and styles and forms. She looks forward to reading a variety of artistic voices.