Joan Wickersham was born in New York City and grew up there and in Connecticut. She is the author of The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt 2008), a National Book Award Finalist. Her first novel, The Paper Anniversary, was published by Viking.
Her fiction has appeared in magazines including Agni, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Story, and has also been published in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. She has published essays and reviews in Glamour, Yankee, The Los Angeles Times, and The International Herald Tribune; and her op-ed column appears regularly in The Boston Globe. She has contributed and read on-air essays for National Public Radio’s “On Point” and “Morning Edition.” She also writes frequently about architecture, including “The Lurker,” a column she created for Architecture Boston magazine.
She has received the Ploughshares Cohen Award for Best Short Story and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She graduated from Yale with a degree in art history, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.
