Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore described her new book A Gate at the Stairs as a meditation on “what it meant to be in this town in the Midwest in this particular time in contemporary America.”


Lorrie Moore was born in Glen Falls, New York on January 13, 1957. She attended St Lawrence University in Canton, New York, from 1974 to 1978 receiving a BA and graduating summa cum laude. She attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, from 1980 to 1982 receiving an MFA. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where she also lives with her husband and son.

She has been the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts award in 1989, the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1989, and the Guggenheim fellowship in 1991. Her work frequently appears in Fiction International, Ms, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, The New Yorker, and others.

Her publications include: Self-Help (1985); Anagrams (1986); The Forgotten Helper (1987); Like Life (1990); editor, I Know Some Things: Stories About Childhood by Contemporary Writers (1992); Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994) and Birds of America (1998).