Eula Biss

NYT Bestselling Author
National Book Critics Circle Award

Biography

“Eula Biss rather than leading through narrative, turns individual words and phrases, like capitalism, consumers, great America, husbandry, art, and work, into fields of inquiry in order to frame a life. With astute consideration, this expansive and intimate accumulation asks the questions that touch all our lives.” –Claudia Rankine

“Biss has been compared to Joan Didion, and the reasons are obvious. Like Didion she has a gift for coming at her subjects from all sides, in unsentimental, lyrical prose.” –Meghan O’Rourke

“She’s a poet, essayist and a class spy…believer and apostate, moth and flame.”–New York Times

Eula Biss is the author of four books, including Having and Being Had (Riverhead Books, 2020), which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and named a Best Book of the Year by Time and NPR. Alexander Chee praised it as “a brilliant, lacerating re-examination of our relationship to what we own and why, and who in turn might own us in ways we didn’t know we consented to—what could be more necessary now?”

Her previous book, On Immunity: An Inoculation (Graywolf Press, 2014) was a New York Times bestseller, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Publisher’s Weekly, the Los Angeles Times and more. Other books are Notes from No Man’s Land (Graywolf Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism and the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and The Balloonists (Hanging Loose Press, 2002). As a 2023 National Fellow at New America, she is at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world.

In a conversation with Hazlitt, Biss was asked about being an artist in a capitalist economy and how art making can look like doing nothing: “It’s one of the problems for an artist within this particular economic system: our work often doesn’t look like work and it’s not compensated like other work. Its value isn’t measured in the same way as other work. I think that can have a profound psychological effect on an artist. It’s one of the things that can lead to the kind of despair that I think is unique to an artist living within this particular economic system, a despair that comes from dedicating your best energies into something that is routinely undervalued and not seen or understood as work.”

Biss’s books have been selected for common reads at Trinity University, Washington University, Seattle University, the University of Kansas, the University of Cincinnati, and Western Michigan School of Medicine, among others. Her work has been translated into over ten languages and has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library, and a Pushcart Prize. Her essays and poems have recently appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine. Biss is a founding editor of Essay Press and a member of the Penny Collective.

Biss holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and taught writing at Northwestern University for fifteen years. She currently teaches nonfiction for the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives outside of Chicago.

Short Bio

Eula Biss is the author of four books: Having and Being Had (2020), On Immunity (2014), Notes from No Man’s Land (2009), and The Balloonists (2002). Her work has been translated into a dozen languages and has been recognized by a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. As a 2023 National Fellow at New America, she is at work on a collection of essays about how private property has shaped our world. For the past twenty years, Biss has taught writing in large lecture halls and small community bookstores, at public elementary schools and private universities. She developed a commitment to progressive education at Hampshire College, where she studied creative writing and visual art before earning an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. She currently teaches nonfiction for the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is a founding editor of Essay Press and a member of the Penny Collective. She lives outside of Chicago.

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