Jill Bialosky

Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Her New York Times Bestselling memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life, was called “a source of solace and understanding” by Time Magazine—or, as in the words of Darin Strauss, “This is the kind of book that can teach us—all of us—about what it means to be a thinking, feeling human being. A book, in other words, that will teach you how to live.”

Bialosky’s collections of poems are The Players (2015); Intruder (2008), which the LA Times called “sharply perceptive, reminding readers about the way life forces us to our knees while restoring us to our true selves”; Subterranean (2001); and The End of Desire (1997). She is the author of the novels House Under Snow (2002) and The Life Room (2007). She is co-editor, with Helen Schulman, of the anthology Wanting A Child (1998).

About The Players, Linda Gregerson writes: “Poetry’s two great subjects, love and mortality, are here made one, and every inflection known to words—hilarity and sorrow, ruefulness and joy—has found its prompting here. Nothing known to a boy on the cusp of manhood, to one beloved boy on the cusp of manhood, is beyond the reach of Bialosky’s resilient imagination. That reach extends to comrades in the dugout, coaches on the baseline, parents in their partisan furies, parents of parents in varying states of departure: everyone’s a player in this elegant and generous book.” Mary Oliver says, simply, “It’s easy to imagine a friend handing a copy to another friend and saying, It’s about us.”

Bialosky has received a number of awards, including the Elliot Coleman Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays appear in The New Yorker, O Magazine, Paris Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review among other publications. Bialosky studied for her undergraduate degree at Ohio University and received a Master of Arts degree from the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

She is currently Executive Editor at W. W. Norton & Company and lives in New York City.