Nationality 1: American

Birthdate: 1968

Heidi Julavits was born in 1968, in Portland, Maine. Her mother taught English and her father was an attorney. As a child, Julavits excelled at mathematics but decided in ninth grade to concentrate instead on books and reading. She attended Deering High School in Portland and then Dartmouth College. After graduation from Dartmouth, she traveled in Asia, and on her return to the United States she settled in San Francisco, where she worked as a copywriter. During her twenties she worked at many jobs, including waitress, movie extra, fashion copywriter, and English teacher.

When Julavits entered Columbia University's graduate writing program, she began writing short stories in earnest. She found it was a real challenge and that her first stories were thirty-five to forty pages long. She gradually learned how to cut them down to more manageable length, and she honed her craft by...