Valerie Hurley is an American fiction writer. She studied writing at the New School, received a B.S. in literature, summa cum laude, from the State University of New York in 1987 and once had a job answering Doctor Seuss’ mail. Her first novel, St. Ursula's Girls Against the Atomic Bomb, was published in hardcover by MacAdam/Cage and in paperback by Penguin. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Sun, New Letters, the Indiana Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, Rosebud, and other magazines. She was a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellow at MacDowell in 2002. Her essays have been awarded Most Notable status five times in Best American Essays and her story Jasmine Washing the Hair of Pearsa won first prize both in the Indiana Review Fiction Contest and the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Contest.
Portrait by Dennis Hearne
