Deborah Eisenberg Birth:
Deborah Eisenberg was born in Chicago, IL on November 20, 1945.
Deborah Eisenberg Background and Writing:
Deborah Eisenberg grew up in Winnetka, Il, which she has called a "hermetically sealed" middle-class suburb of Chicago. With her full-torso scoliosis brace, Eisenberg was a something of a rebellious misfit, and her parents responded by sending her to boarding school in Vermont. She later attended Marlboro College where she studied Greek and Latin before packing up for New York where she worked as a waitress, earned her B.A. from the New School, and met the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn (Essays), with whom she would end up spending most of her life.
Eisenberg is a renown writer of short fiction whose stories of individuals struggling in their personal relationships are emotionally perceptive and incisive. She has published several volumes of short work, including Twilight of the Superheroes, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award in 2007. The title story from Twilight of the Superheroes depicts a group of twenty-somethings who witnessed the September 11 terrorist attacks simultaneously coping with the disaster's psychological aftermath and everyday life.
Eisenberg has been awarded numerous awards for her work, including a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She won the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for her book, The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. She teaches at the University of Virginia.
