Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel that became a feature film starting Cameron Diaz in 2001; Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001; Emerald City and Other Stories; and The Keep, which was a national bestseller. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, McSweeney’s, and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and her most recent article, “The Bipolar Kid,” received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her latest book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was published in June 2010 and won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It is also a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

The author will be available to sign books after the reading. As always, books are available for purchase in the Museum Store.

UMMA is pleased to be the site for the Department of English Program in Creative Writing Zell Visiting Writers Series, which brings outstanding writers each semester. The Series is made possible through a generous gift from UM alumna Helen Zell (’64). For more information, please see www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/mfaeve.asp.