Michelle Herman‘s latest book, the essay collection If You Say So, is just out from Galileo Press. The author of three earlier essay collections – The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song – as well as four novels (Missing, Dog, Devotion, and Close-Up), the novella collection A New and Glorious Life, and a book for children, A Girl’s Guide to Life, her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Sun, American Scholar, O, the Oprah Magazine,Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and many other journals. Her awards and honors include numerous individual artist’s fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Copernicus Foundation, the Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, and two major teaching awards – the University Distinguished Teaching Award and the Rodica Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring – from Ohio State, where she taught for thirty-four years and was a founder of the MFA program in creative writing. She also founded and directed, until her retirement from teaching in 2022, a graduate interdisciplinary program across the arts. She continues in her role as the executive and artistic director of an all-scholarship, in-residence summer writing program for teenage writers on the OSU campus.