Prize-winning novelist and short story writer who has published seven novels—among them King Of The World, which won the Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award for an "important and unusual book of literary distinction," and The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for "the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme" — as well as five volumes of short stories, nine young adult novels, and three books of non-fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in literary journals such as The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southwest Review, Shenandoah, The Chattahoochee Review and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She has published essays in The American Scholar, Commentary, The Sewanee Review, Salmagundi and The Writer. She earned her M.A. in English from Brandeis University and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.