Cheryl Strayed is a novelist and essayist living in Portland

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

, Oregon

Oregon

Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...

. Her debut novel, TORCH, was published by Houghton Mifflin

Houghton Mifflin

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is an educational and trade publisher in the United States. Headquartered in Boston's Back Bay, it publishes textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and non-fiction for both young readers and adults.-History:The company was...

 in 2006. Her essays have been published in several magazines, including The Washington Post Magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and have been selected twice for inclusion in The Best American Essays (2000 and 2003 editions). TORCH was a finalist for the Great Lakes Book Award and was selected by The Oregonian

The Oregonian

The Oregonian is the major daily newspaper in Portland, Oregon, owned by Advance Publications. It is the oldest continuously published newspaper on the U.S. west coast, founded as a weekly by Thomas J. Dryer on December 4, 1850...

as one of the top ten books of 2006 by writers living in the Pacific Northwest.

Strayed received her BA from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and her MFA in fiction writing from Syracuse University.

Her writing is award winning. She ofttimes writes about her mother.