Michelle Herman

Michelle Herman (born March 9, 1955, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American writer and Professor Emerita of English at Ohio State University. Her most widely known work is the novel Dog, which WorldCat shows in 545 libraries and has been translated into multiple languages. She has also written the novel Missing, which was awarded the Harold Ribalow Prize for Jewish fiction, and Close-Up, which won the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence. Her most recent book is the memoir-in-essays If You Say So. She is married to the painter Glen Holland. They have a daughter.

Biography Herman received a B.A./B.S. from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, after which she was a James Michener Fellow. She taught from 1988 until 2022 at the Ohio State University, where she was a founder of both the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and an interdisciplinary graduate program in the arts.

She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and many grants from the Ohio Arts Council and Greater Columbus Arts Council in addition to her James Michener Fellowship.

In addition to her novels, she has published a collection of short fiction, A New and Glorious Life. "Auslander," which appears in the collection was also included in American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories by Gerald Shapiro and other anthologies.

She has also published three earlier essay collections, The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song. She writes a weekly advice columnist for Slate.

Roberta Maierhofer viewed Herman's novel Missing as a literary gerontology example of the process of redefining one's self in advancing age.