Amy Hempel

Author Amy Hempel, widely recognized as one of America’s finest writers of short fiction, will host a colloquium on the craft of fiction at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 17. In addition, Hempel will read from her work at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 18.

Surprisingly, officers leaving the military — even after service in Iraq — are finding that a bachelor’s degree and leadership experience are not enough to arm them for more than an entry-level job at a Fortune 500 company. So what they’re seeking — and what makes them particularly desirable to employers — is a master of business administration degree, says Stuart I. Greenbaum, Ph.D., dean of the Olin School of Business at Washington University. Known for her minimalist style, Hempel has been praised by The New York Times Book Review as “certainly one of the most experimental and potentially the most exciting of the writers of her generation.”

She is the author of three collections: Reasons to Live (1985), At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990) and Tumble Home (1997). Her stories have appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper’s, The Quarterly, The Yale Review and several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Hempel’s nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Elle, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Mirabella, Interview and Bomb, among others. She also edited, with Jim Shepard, Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs (1995).

Hempel was born in Chicago in 1951 and spent her early years in California, where she attended Whittier College and San Francisco State College. She later moved to New York to pursue a writing career and for a time was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Now on faculty at Bennington College in Vermont and The New School University in New York, she also has taught at New York University, Saint Mary’s College and the University of Missouri. Her numerous honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Hobson Award.