Memoirs of a Fiction Writer: Courtney Zoffness and Gina Frangello in Conversation

In Conversation

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  Courtney Zoffness

  Courtney Zoffness

  Courtney Zoffness writes fiction and nonfiction. She won the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship, the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, and residencies from MacDowell. Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, the Southern Review, the New York Times, Longreads, and elsewhere. Spilt Milk (McSweeney’s 2021), her debut memoir-in-essays, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by LitHub and The Millions, and was listed as a Best New Book of 2021 by Refinery29. Courtney directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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  Gina Frangello

  Gina Frangello

  Gina Frangello is the author of four books of fiction in addition to the memoir, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint 2021). Her novel A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014) is currently in development by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah. Her most recent novel, Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint 2016) was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including in Chicago magazine and the Chicago Review of Books. She has nearly 20 years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for the Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and the Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and in many other magazines and anthologies. After two decades of teaching at many universities, including University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies, UCLA Extension, the University of California Riverside Palm Desert, Roosevelt University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago, and Lake Forest College, Gina is excited to be a student again at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Program for Writers, where she has returned to complete the PhD she left unfinished twenty years ago. She lives mainly in Chicago and occasionally in the California desert with her family and three gluttonous cats.