Joan Silber

Joan Silber (born 1945) is an American novelist and short story writer. She won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the 2018 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel Improvement.

Biography

Joan Silber was born in 1945. She grew up in Millburn, New Jersey. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and obtained an M.A. from New York University. She taught at NYU and now teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

Silber's work has been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories six times—in 2003, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015, and 2021. It also appeared in the Best American Short Stories 2015, and won The Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Tin House, Epoch, The Southern Review, Agni, The Colorado Review, and other publications.