Merrill Joan Gerber


Merrill Joan Gerber is an American writer. She is an O. Henry Award winner.

Biography

Gerber was born in Brooklyn, New York, March 15, 1938. She received a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Florida in 1959, and a Masters in English from Brandeis University in 1980. Her work was an early fiction recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford, where she studied under Stegner himself.
She has published more than thirty books, and is a novelist and short story writer. She has published stories in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The American Scholar'', Mademoiselle, Redbook, The Sewanee Review, Salmagundi, The Southwest Review, and many other journals. She published her first poem in The Writer at the age of eighteen and her first book of short stories, Stop Here, My Friend, at twenty-seven.
In 1986 Gerber won an O. Henry Prize. In 1993, she won the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for her novel, The Kingdom of Brooklyn''. After teaching fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology for three decades, she retired in 2020. Her literary archive resides at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book Library.
Her work is known for its humor and dark subjects.

Awards

Books

Novels

An Antique Man Now Molly Knows The Lady With the Moving Parts King of the World The Kingdom of Brooklyn Anna in the Afterlife Glimmering Girls The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn The Hysterectomy Waltz
  • ''You Are Always Safe With Me''

Short stories

Stop Here, My Friend Honeymoon Chattering Man: Stories and a Novella This Old Heart of Mine: The Best of Merrill Joan Gerber’s Redbook Stories Anna in Chains This Is a Voice From Your Past: New and Selected Stories
  • ''Someone Should Know This Story''

Young adult

Please Don’t Kiss Me Now Name a Star for Me I’m Kissing as Fast as I Can The Summer of My Indian Prince Also Known as Sadzia! The Belly Dancer! Marry Me Tomorrow Even Pretty Girls Cry at Night I’d Rather Think About Robby
  • ''Handsome as Anything''

Memoirs & nonfiction

Old Mother, Little Cat: A Writer's Reflections on her Kitten, Her Aged Mother, and Life Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence Gut Feelings: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions Beauty and the Breast: A Tale of Breast Cancer, Love and Friendship
  • ''Revelation at the Food Bank: Essays''