Catherine Petroski

Catherine Petroski (1939 - ), born Catherine Groom in St. Louis, Missouri, is an American author of fiction and non-fiction, reviews, and poetry. She holds degrees from MacMurray College and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

Her short fiction and poetry appeared in many literary magazines and in anthologies, among them the Best American Short Story, Pushcart Prize, and O. Henry Prize collections. William H. Gass described her writing as "quiet, lyrical, deeply meditative" prose from which a "lovely and mysterious" meaning emerges.... "It is a process that it wonderful to watch." Novelist Hilma Wolitzer wrote that Petroski "understands perfectly the world of childhood and makes the reader see the ways in which we become adults."

She won the Texas Institute of Letters Prize in short fiction, and her biography of Susan Hathorn, "A Bride's Passage: Susan Hathorn's Year Under Sail", won the John Lyman Prize for Biography and was hailed as "a valuable social history of a maritime family in mid-19th-century New England." Maritime historian Joan Druett described "A Bride's Passage" as "a superbly written, formidably researched retelling of Susan Hathorn's honeymoon voyage through the pages of her diary." "Publishers Weekly"'s starred review described "A Bride's Passage" as "a compelling contribution to maritime literature and the lives of Victorian-age women...."

She has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Creative Writing, residency fellowships at the Corporation of Yaddo, and has been a Scholar and a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. She has taught writing and literature at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and aboard ships at sea. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, The Authors Guild, and SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research.

She lives in Durham NC with her husband, the engineer and author Henry Petroski.

Writings

Books:
*"Gravity and Other Stories" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0931362059]
*"Beautiful My Mane in the Wind" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000KONYHW]
*"The Summer that Lasted Forever" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0395353882]
*"A Bride’s Passage: Susan Hathorn’s Year Under Sail" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/1555532977] .

See also:
*Anthology appearances: "Heartbeat for Horses" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595434437] ,"The Literary Horse", "The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0571170838] and "I Know Some Things" [ [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0571198023] , both edited by Lorrie Moore); "Jo's Girls " [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0807062111] , "The PEN Short Story Collection" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/034532126X] , "Stories for Free Children" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0070503982] , "Prize Stories: Texas Institute of Letters [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0933841043] ", and others.
*"History Through Paper Windows" [http://www.dukemagazine.duke.edu/alumni/dm8/history_txt.html]
*"Something about the Author" [http://www.amazon.com/s?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Something+About+the+Author] and "Contemporary Authors" [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0787619949] .