Photo by Shari Diamond
and other magazines. She’s been the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
For many years Joan taught fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Joan lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, with Jolie, her rescued street dog from Taiwan, and she travels as often as she can, with a particular interest in Asia.
Joan Silber was raised in New Jersey and received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied writing with Grace Paley. She moved to New York after college and has made it her home ever since. She holds an M.A. from New York University.
She’s written ten books of fiction--most recently, Mercy, out in fall 2025. Secrets of Happiness was a Washington Post Best Book of the year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Improvement won The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She also received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Her other works of fiction include Fools, longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Size of the World, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize in Fiction, and Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She’s also written Lucky Us, In My Other Life, and In the City (to be reissued by Hagfish in 2026), and her first book, Household Words, won the PEN/Hemingway Award.
She’s the author of The Art of Time in Fiction, which looks at how fiction is shaped and determined by time, with examples from world writers. Her short fiction has been chosen for the O. Henry Prize, Best American Short Stories, and the Pushcart Prize. Stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Zyzzyva