Merrill Joan Gerber

Merrill Joan Gerber (born March 15, 1938) is an American writer. She is an O. Henry Award winner.

Biography Gerber was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1938. She received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Florida in 1959, and a Masters in English from Brandeis University in 1980. Her work was an early fiction recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford, where she studied under Stegner himself.

She has published more than thirty books, , Mademoiselle, Redbook, The Sewanee Review, Salmagundi, The Southwest Review, and many other journals. She published her first poem in The Writer at the age of eighteen and her first book of short stories, Stop Here, My Friend, at twenty-seven.

Her work is known for its humor and dark subjects.

Awards O. Henry Award Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing (for fiction) from Stanford University Harold Ribalow Prize from Hadassah Magazine for The Kingdom of Brooklyn Pushcart Editors' Book Award for King of the World Best American Essays Seventeen Magazine Fiction Contest

Young adult Please Don’t Kiss Me Now (Dial, 1981) Name a Star for Me (Viking, 1983) I’m Kissing as Fast as I Can (Fawcett Juniper, 1985) The Summer of My Indian Prince (Ballantine, 1986) Also Known as Sadzia! The Belly Dancer! (Harper & Row, 1987) Marry Me Tomorrow (Ballantine, 1987) Even Pretty Girls Cry at Night (Crosswinds, 1988) I’d Rather Think About Robby (Harper & Row, 1989) Handsome as Anything (Scholastic, 1990)

Memoirs & nonfiction Old Mother, Little Cat: A Writer's Reflections on her Kitten, Her Aged Mother, and Life (Longstreet Press, 1995) Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002) Gut Feelings: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) Beauty and the Breast: A Tale of Breast Cancer, Love and Friendship (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2023)