author bio: Tara Deal is the author of three award-winning novellas: Life / Insurance (Regal House), That Night Alive (Miami University Press), and Palms Are Not Trees After All (Texas Review Press). She also writes flash fiction, free verse, and urban fragments. Her work has appeared in American Literary Review, Passages North, Sugar House Review, Washington Square Review, and West Branch, among others. And her shortest story can be found in Hint Fiction (Norton). She lives in New York City with her husband.
personal note: I was born in Savannah, Georgia, and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. (What I miss: boiled peanuts.) My first job was selling hosiery and costume jewelry at Tapp’s department store, an experience I wrote about on my college application. After receiving degrees from Harvard and New York University, I then worked as a book editor for many years. (What I don’t miss: compiling book indexes.) For a long time, the author bio that appeared with my work used to say, “She lives in New York City with her husband and two dogs.” And that was my favorite sentence to write.
Read more about living with dogs in the city in the Wall Street Journal.
Read more about thoughts on novellas at Jane Friedman and Writer’s Digest.