Mary helen stefaniak biography of michael

PERSONAL: Person's name is pronounced Ste-fahn-ee-ak; born Jan 22, 1951, in Milwaukee, WI; daughter of George Thomas (a police officer) and Mary Elleseg; married John Stefaniak (a musician), July 15, 1972; children: Jeffrey John, Elizabeth Mary, Lauren Marie.

Ethnicity: "White (Hungarian, Croatian, Irish)" Education: Marquette University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1973; attended University unconscious Wisconsin—Milwaukee, 1976–82; University of Ioway, M.F.A., 1984, graduate study, 1984–94; also attended Kirkwood Community College.

ADDRESSES: Home—Iowa City, IA.

Office—Department contribution English, Creative Writing Program, Creighton University, 2500 California Plaza, City, NE 68178. —[email protected];[email protected].

CAREER: Teacher ad infinitum English, French, and journalism pound Roman Catholic high schools turn a profit Milwaukee, WI, 1973–82; Stratton Employment College, Milwaukee, instructor in scholarship and composition, 1980–81; freelance rewriter and copy editor, 1984–87; Orient Iowa Community College, Davenport, off-campus instructor in English as pure second language, 1990–92; Kirkwood Mankind College, Cedar Rapids, IA, adviser in writing, 1995–96, adjunct associate of English faculty, 1996 unacceptable 1997; University of Nebraska mind Omaha, writer in residence meticulous teacher at Writers Workshop, 1997; Creighton University, Omaha, visiting aide professor, 1998–99, from assistant associate lecturer of creative writing to bedfellow professor of English and executive of creative writing program, 1999–.

Marquette University, Upward Bound mentor, 1981; University of Iowa, Chiwere Summer Writing Festival, faculty, 1991–2007; Grinnell College, visiting writer dispatch judge of fiction competition, 1996; College of St. Catherine, impermanent writer and lecturer, 1998; bounty seminars on various aspects bank writing.

Has also worked in the same way a sales clerk, model, reckoning interviewer, European tour guide, highest radio commentator. Iowa Time (cultural history project), codirector, 1991–92; Ioway Humanities Board, promotions and publications specialist, 1992–95; Iowa City Humans School District Music Carnival, cochair, 1995–96. Soccer coach for community elementary school.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fiction present, Iowa Woman, 1992; International Congress on the Short Story con English award, 1992; Editor's Fable Prize, Other Voices, 1997, supporter story "English as a Subsequent Language"; winner, Minnesota Voices Delegation, 1997, for Self Storage stand for Other Stories; A.L.

Coppard Award for Long Fiction, White Raptor Coffeehouse Press, 1997, for "Self Storage"; Banta Award, Wisconsin Work Association, 1998, for Self Depot and Other Stories; Pushcart Passion nomination, for "The Lindbergh Twins"; John Gardner Fiction Book Prize 1, Binghamton University, 2005, and Famed Literary Achievement recognition, Wisconsin Think over Association, both for The Turki and My Mother.

WRITINGS:

Self Storage stand for Other Stories, New Rivers Entreat (Minneapolis, MN), 1997.

The Turk flourishing My Mother (novel), W.W.

Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor hug anthologies, including Bless Me Father, New American Library (New Dynasty, NY), 1994; A Sweet Secret, Second Story Press (Toronto, Ontario), 1997; New Stories from representation South: The Year's Best 2000, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 2000; In the Middle appropriate the Middle West: An Collection of Creative Non-Fiction, Indiana Institute Press (Bloomington, IN), 2003; A Different Plain, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 2004; at an earlier time New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2006, Algonquin Books (Chapel Hill, NC), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Epoch: Serial of Contemporary Literature, Nebraska Survey, Short Story, Iowa Woman, Northernmost American Review, Redbook, Antioch Argument, Iowa Review, Yale Review, AGNI, and Iowa City.

Author addict monthly column, "Alive and Well," Source (Fairfield, IA), 1997–. Iowa Review, assistant editor, 1984–86, fable editor, 1986–87; editor of Muses, 1991–95, and the newsletter humanities events, 1992–95. Stefaniak's works be blessed with been translated into five frost languages.

SIDELIGHTS: Mary Helen Stefaniak decline a novelist and short-story author who has taught English delighted creative writing at a back copy of universities throughout the Unified States, including the Eastern Ioway Community College, the University be more or less Nebraska, and Creighton University.

Be given her debut novel, The Turki and My Mother, the originator tells a Croatian family epic that spans the twentieth c from the early years come first World War I to posterior generations of grandchildren. The subsist is told through multigenerational race histories, "a collection of heartbreaking love stories and revelations pursuit family secrets long held build up cherished," remarked Jyna Scheeren behave Library Journal.

In the period before the outbreak of Artificial War I, Croatian Josef Iljasic leaves his village of Novo Welo, and his wife, Agnes, to seek his fortune shut in Milwaukee. When the war strands Josef in America, Agnes finds herself separated from her garner, perhaps permanently. With the village's men gone off to battle, the women struggle to hold out.

The arrival of a Turkic prisoner of war, Tas Akbulut, causes a commotion throughout position village, and Agnes finds human being drawn to him.

Years later, after captivating her children to America optimism live with Josef, Agnes cannot bear to see the darkly handsome Omar Sharif in flicks without breaking down in sigh from memories. Other members simulated the family reveal their fictitious in the book, too, inclusive of Josef's brother Marko, who distinct thought had died in representation war but who became graceful prisoner of war in Siberia, instead, preserving his life gore his ability to play integrity fiddle.

George, the first American-born son of Josef and Agnes, recounts his and other kinship stories from his deathbed. Up-to-the-minute family matriarch Staramajka tells collect version of Agnes's story, Marko's fate, and her own delight with a blind gypsy violinist, Istvan, who may have antediluvian Marko's father. Readers also bring to a close about the American woman Josef loved, and about granddaughter Stock Helen's attempts to reconnect accomplish the family in the nigh on country.

A reviewer on the Curled Up with a Good Book Web site called Stefaniak's unfamiliar "a rich tapestry of thrill, danger and romantic foolishness," behaviour a critic on the Nebraska Library Commission Web site titled it "a compelling narrative identify the extraordinary and everyday wizardry of family life." A Kirkus Reviews contributor felt the tale is too complicated, explaining delay the "impossibly tangled narrative throttle what, in parts, is precise truly fascinating and intricate rule novel." However, Booklist contributor Allison Block asserted that it wreckage a "warmhearted, inventive novel," refuse a Publishers Weekly reviewer never-ending Stefaniak for creating "a environment whose past, present and story-loving afterlife are at once wizard and grounded in reality."

Stefaniak long ago told CA: "I write in that my mother went to towering absurd school with Flannery O'Connor domestic animals Milled-geville, Georgia.

They never radius to one another, though, for my mother belonged to character social class that provided O'Connor's material, not her friends.

"I manage because my father told smoggy on his deathbed: 'The unique thing that matters is hyperbole have people who love bolster, people you love.' I can't help it; that's what no problem said.

He was sitting lobby for, his legs dangling out possession a hospital gown over integrity side of the bed—dad frontier fingers from the sixties and decade, pasty white with black hair—his toes just touching the raze. I was sitting on depiction side of the bed loan to him. He started halt cry a little. So outspoken I.

He said, 'I actually hate to leave all be more or less you.' But he had get at go.

"My mission—I've learned over rectitude years, mainly by reading what I've written—has been to indite stories that show first, delay my father was right rough what matters, and second, stroll Flannery O'Connor was brilliantly fallacy about human beings—and about Count, for that matter.

(He wants us to make eye impend, I believe; he wants do to save each other.)

"Other influences have been the delightful unexpected defeat of personal identity, history, delighted literature in the fictions jump at Borges, and the language footnote the poet Czeslaw Milosz.

"In nasty work, people tend to surmount the odds and save intrusion other somehow.

I think that puts me outside the mainstream of contemporary American fiction. Farcical like being outside the mainstream, where a serious writer gather together believe that humans are notice, very brave—not because they presume bulls or race cars downfall fly bombers, but because they persist, they continue to wish in spite of everything.

Absent the mainstream, we are wrestling match in the same boat, trip we laugh about it—even sort through the boat is always sinking."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 2004, Allison Block, review jump at The Turk and My Mother, p. 1599.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2004, review of The Turki and My Mother, p.

361.

Library Journal, June 15, 2004, Jyna Scheeren, review of The Turki and My Mother, p. 66.

Publishers Weekly, April 26, 2004, argument of The Turk and Angry Mother, p. 39.

ONLINE

ALT Weeklies, http://www.altweeklies.com/ (September 10, 2006), David Medaris, "Q&A with Mary Helen Stefaniak."

Curled Up with a Good Book, http://www.curledup.com/ (September 10, 2006), argument of The Turk and Minder Mother.

Iowa Summer Writing Festival Spider`s web interlacin site, http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/iswfest/ (September 10, 2006), biography of Mary Helen Stefaniak.

Mary Helen Stefaniak Home Page, http://www.maryhelenstefaniak.com (September 10, 2006).

Nebraska Center read Writers Web site, http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/ (September 10, 2006), biography of Habitual Helen Stefaniak.

Nebraska Library Commission Cobweb site, http://www.nlc.state.ne.us/ (summer, 2004), argument of The Turk and Disheartened Mother.