Catherine Lacey

Bio

Catherine Lacey is the author of the novel Nobody Is Ever Missing and a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award for Fiction. Earlier this year, Lacey published her second novel, The Answers, which follows a young woman who takes part in a scientific romantic experiment. (“How best to love?” muses one of the novel’s narrators. “Such a serious thing we’re doing and no one really knows how to do it.”) In addition to contributing essays and criticism to The New York Times, Vice, and Guernica, she is currently the 2017-2018 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her first short story collection, Certain American States, will be published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2018. Here, she discusses her daily writing practice, teaching MFA students, and why success as a writer doesn’t necessarily mean being published.