Natalie Serber

I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, an only child of a single mother, I spent my youth riding my bike and reading incessantly. My college days were spent at University of California at Irvine where I studied English with a writing emphasis and then I studied at UC Santa Cruz taking a degree in education. I imagined I would be a teacher like my mother, or maybe I would write for magazines. When I had my children, I loved being a stay-at-home parent. I gardened, cooked, volunteered at their schools. When my youngest entered preschool, I took a writing class and then I took another. Soon I gave up gardening and took up early rising to write at my desk. With my kids in elementary school I wrote in coffeehouses and at the library, in the parking lot where I waited for them after school. I published in small journals, The Bellingham Review, Inkwell Magazine, Third Coast, Fourth Genre, Hunger Mountain to name a few, and those publications sustained me, they allowed me to continue believing in my work. I was lucky enough to win some prizes, John Steinbeck Award, Tobias Wolff Award, H.E. Francis Award, I was short listed in Best American Short Stories. All of this led me to Warren Wilson College for graduate school where I received my MFA in fiction. Through the raising of my family I continued writing. Now as my youngest enters college and I teeter on the cusp of an empty nest and a new decade of my life, my book, SHOUT HER LOVELY NAME is forthcoming with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. There’s a lovely symmetry to my timeline and if I wrote it in a story, no one would believe it.