Steve Stern is a critically acclaimed author from Memphis

Memphis, Tennessee

Memphis is a city in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Tennessee, and the county seat of Shelby County. The city is located on the 4th Chickasaw Bluff, south of the confluence of the Wolf and Mississippi rivers....

, Tennessee

Tennessee

Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...

. Much of his work draws inspiration from Yiddish folklore.

Biography

Stern was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1947, the son of a grocer. He left Memphis in the 1960s to attend college, then to travel the US and Europe — living, as he told one interviewer, "the wayward life of my generation for about a decade," and ending on a hippie

Hippie

The hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that arose in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world. The etymology of the term 'hippie' is from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's...

 commune

Commune

Commune may refer to:In society:* Commune, a human community in which resources are shared* Commune , a township or municipality* One of the Communes of France* An Italian Comune...

 in the Ozarks. He went on to study writing in the graduate program at the University of Arkansas

University of Arkansas

The University of Arkansas is a public, co-educational, land-grant, space-grant, research university. It is classified by the Carnegie Foundation as a research university with very high research activity. It is the flagship campus of the University of Arkansas System and is located in...

, at a time when it included several notable writers who've since become prominent, including poet C.D. Wright and fiction writers Ellen Gilchrist

Ellen Gilchrist

Ellen Gilchrist is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet.-Life:Gilchrist was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and spent part of her childhood on a plantation owned by her maternal grandparents. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy and studied creative writing, especially...

, Lewis Nordan

Lewis Nordan

Lewis Nordan grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi. He is a graduate of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1983, at age forty-five, Nordan published his first collection of stories, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair...

, Lee K. Abbott

Lee K. Abbott

Lee Kittredge Abbott is an American writer. He is the author of six collections of short stories and teaches writing at the Ohio State University in Columbus.-Life:...

 and Jack Butler

Jack Butler

Jack Butler may refer to:* Jack Butler Yeats , Irish artist* Jack Butler , English football player and manager* Jack Butler , Chirk F.C...

.

Stern subsequently moved to London, England, before returning to Memphis in his thirties to accept a job at a local folklore center. There he learned about the city's old Jewish ghetto, The Pinch

The Pinch

The Pinch is a literary journal published at the University of Memphis. The journal is published biannually. Work that has appeared in The Pinch has been reprinted in the Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading...

, and began to steep himself in Yiddish folklore. He published his first book, the story collection Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter, which was based in The Pinch, in 1983. It won the Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and acclaim from some notable critics, including Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...

, who praised the book's "brio ... whiplash sentences ... energy and charm," and observed that "Steve Stern may be a late practitioner of the genre" of Yiddish folklore, "but he is an expert one."

By decade's end Stern had won the O. Henry Award

O. Henry Award

The O. Henry Award is the only yearly award given to short stories of exceptional merit. The award is named after the American master of the form, O. Henry....

, two Pushcart Prize awards, published more collections, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (which won the Edward Lewis Wallant

Edward Lewis Wallant

Edward Lewis Wallant was an American writer.-Life:He lived most of his life in New Haven, Connecticut. Yet his years at Pratt in Brooklyn, daily commuting to the city and frequent visits to jazz clubs impacted the New York settings of his books.His first works were short stories published in the...

 Award for Jewish American Fiction) and the novel Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, and was being hailed by critics such as Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. She is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson.-Background:Cynthia Shoshana Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children...

 as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. Stern's 2000 collection The Wedding Jester won the National Jewish Book Award, and his novel The Angel of Forgetfulness was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Washington Post.

Stern, who teaches at Skidmore College

Skidmore College

Skidmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college with an enrollment of approximately 2,500 students. The college is located in the town of Saratoga Springs, New York State....

, has also won some notable scholarly awards, including fellowships from the Fulbright and the Guggenheim foundations. He currently lives in Ballston Spa, New York, and his latest work, the novel The Frozen Rabbi,
was published in 2010.

Works

• Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter (Lost Roads Publishers, 1983)
• The Moon & Ruben Shein (August House, 1984)
• Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (VIking, 1986)
• Mickey and the Golem (St. Lukes Press, 1986) (children's book)
• Hershel and the Beast (Ion Books, 1987) (children's book)
• Harry Kaplan's Adventures Under Ground (Ticknor & Fields, 1991)
• A Plague of Dreamers: Three Novellas (Scribner's, 1994)
• The Wedding Jester (Graywolf Press, 1999)
• The Angel of Forgetfulness (Viking, 2006)
• The North of God (Melville House Publishing
  Melville House Publishing
  Melville House Publishing is an independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The company was founded in 2001 by the husband and wife team of Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians in Hoboken, New Jersey, a location Johnson jokingly called "the Left Bank" of New York City...
  
  , 2008) ISBN 978-1-933633-56-5
• The Frozen Rabbi (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2010)

External links

• Audio: Steve Stern at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2007
• "Dybuks in Dixie," profile of Steve Stern from The New York Times, March 1, 1987
• "Tugging at Jewish Weeds: An interview with Steve Stern," from MELUS, the Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Spring 2007
• "Journeying to the Other Side: A Q & A with Steve Stern" in The Jewish Forward, May 29, 2008
• "The Angel of Forgetfulness," Michael Dirda on Steve Stern in The Washington Post, April 3, 2005
• "He's a Literary Darling Looking for Dear Readers," a profile of Steve Stern from The New York Times, April 25, 2005
• "Between Vilna & Dixie: Andrew Furman talks with writer Steve Stern," from The Yiddish Book Center (undated)
• Interview with Steve Stern at Lukeford.net (undated)