Eileen Pollack

Eileen Pollack was one of the first two women to graduate from Yale University with a BS in physics; she later earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novels The Professor of Immortality, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, and Breaking and Entering, which won the Grub Street National Book Prize was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, as well as two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and In the Mouth, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Eileen’s work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was published by Beacon Press in 2015; a long excerpt appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and went viral, after which she spent five years touring the United States, working to advance the opportunities for women and people of color in STEM fields. Her work has been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Travel Writing. Her most recent book is an essay collection entitled Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman, which received starred reviews in Kirkus and PW. The former director of the MFA Program at the University of Michigan, she is now a professor emerita and lives and writes in Boston.