Jane Ciabattari

Jane Ciabattari is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection, "Stealing the Fire" (Kirkus Reviews: "Ciabattari is a master of transformation as she gives these stories of loss, woe, crisis and collapse the salutary and sometimes bracing qualities of plain good fiction.") Her short stories have been published in KBG Bar Lit, VerbSap, Ms. Magazine (nominated for O.Henry and Pushcart awards), The North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hampton Shorts (which honored her with an Editors' Choice STUBBY Award), The East Hampton Star, Blueline, Caprice and Redbook, which nominated her for a National Magazine Award. Her story "Payback Time" (see link) was a Pushcart Prize "special mention." Her story "How I Left Onandaga County," appears in the anthology "The Best Underground Fiction" (November 2006,Stolen Time Press) and also was a Pushcart Prize honorable mention.

She serves as president of the National Book Critics Circle and is a regular blogger on the NBCC board blog, Critical Mass. She is a vice president of the Overseas Press Club, former board chair of Women's eNews, the daily online news service, a past president of the Women's Media Group, and a member of the Authors Guild, PEN and The Century Association.

Her articles and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, Ms., Poets & Writers Magazine, The East Hampton Star, Kirkus Reviews, Threepenny Review, Psychology Today and the Columbia Journalism Review. Ciabattari has been awarded fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been associate faculty at Bennington's Low-Residency MFA program,taught at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois (where she was Distinguished Writer in Residence/Visiting Professor of English in Fall 2005), Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, New York University and at numerous writers' conferences, including the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Borderlands (Tenants Harbor, ME). She also has been fiction writer in residence at the Chautauqua Institution's Writers' Center.

Ciabattari was a longtime Contributing Editor to Parade magazine and has worked as Managing Editor of California Living, the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle; managing editor of Redbook, editor in chief of DIAL, the public television magazine; Senior Consulting Editor in Fiction at McCall's, and as a reporter and columnist for the Montana Standard in Butte, Montana. For Parade she traveled widely (Havana,Hong Kong, Marrakech, Paris, Prague, Rome, Shanghai) and interviewed hundreds, including Sherman Alexie, Isabel Allende,Halle Berry, Sandra Bullock, Jimmy Carter, John Cusack, Michael Douglas, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, Sylvester Stallone, Margaret Thatcher, Emma Thompson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Renee Zellweger.

Ciabattari was born and raised in Emporia, Kansas. She began her writing career as a high school columnist for The Emporia Gazette. She studied creative writing at Stanford University (B.A.) and San Francisco State University (M.A.). With her husband Mark, who also is a writer, she divides her time between Sag Harbor, NY, New York City and Windham, NY.