Alyce Miller

Alyce Miller is the author of two short story collections, Water, winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize, and The Nature of Longing, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award; and a novel, Stopping for Green Lights, which expanded one of the stories in Nature of Longing, and explored in more depth the complications of interracial friendships and racial categories during a tumultuous time. She also writes and publishes nonfiction (essays) and poetry. She was born in Zurich, Switzerland and lived for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Among her other awards are the Kenyon Review Award for Excellence in Literary Fiction, and the Lawrence Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. She is a professor in the English department at Indiana University, and is also an attorney who works for animal rights. She believes that animals are not "just property," as the law defines them, but deserving of a different status that acknowledges their sentience, intelligence, emotionality, and capacity for happiness. In a recent interview, she stated that "writers have an obligation to know and pay attention to the world they live in."