Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham
Cunningham in New York, 2007
Born	(1952-11-06) November 6, 1952 Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Influences Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman
Signature
www.michaelcunninghamwriter.com

Michael Cunningham (born November 6, 1952) is an American writer. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is currently a professor of creative writing at Yale University.

Early life and education

Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and grew up in Pasadena, California. He studied English literature at Stanford University where he earned his degree. Later, at the University of Iowa, he received a Michener Fellowship and was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. While studying at Iowa, he had short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review. His short story, "White Angel", was later used as a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World. It was included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989," published by Houghton Mifflin.

In 1993, Cunningham received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 1998 a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 1995 he was awarded the Whiting Writers' Award. Cunningham has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College. He is currently professor of creative writing at Yale University.

Career

The Hours established Cunningham as a major force in American writing, and his most recent novel, By Nightfall, was also well received by American critics. Cunningham has edited a book of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman, Laws for Creations, and has co-written, with Susan Minot, a screenplay adapted from Minot's novel Evening. He is also a producer for the 2007 film, Evening, which stars Glenn Close, Toni Collette, and Meryl Streep.

In November, 2010, Cunningham judged one of NPR's "Three Minute Fiction" contests.

Personal life

Although Cunningham is gay and was in a long-term domestic partnership with psychoanalyst Ken Corbett, he dislikes being referred to as a gay writer, according to a PlanetOut article. While being gay greatly influences his work, he feels that it should not be his defining characteristic.^{[citation needed]}

Bibliography

Cunningham reading at a W. H. Auden tribute in New York.

Novels

• 1984 Golden States
• 1990 A Home at the End of the World
• 1995 Flesh and Blood
• 1998 The Hours
• 2005 Specimen Days
• 2010 By Nightfall

Nonfiction

• 2002 Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown

Screenplays

• 2004 A Home at the End of the World
• 2007 Evening

Contributor

• 2000 Drawn By The Sea (exhibition catalogue text; 110 signed copies)
• 2001 The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf (Modern Library Classics edition) (Introduction)
• 2001 I Am Not This Body: The Pinhole Photographs of Barbara Ess (Text)
• 2004 Washington Square by Henry James (Signet Classics edition) (Afterword)
• 2004 Death In Venice by Thomas Mann (new translation by Michael Henry Heim) (Introduction)
• 2006 Laws for Creations, Poems by Walt Whitman (Editor and introduction)
• 2007 a Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer edited by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle (Short Story, The Destruction Artist)

Awards and achievements

• "White Angel" was included in the 1989 Best American Short Stories.
• "Mr. Brother" was included in the 1999 O. Henry Prize Stories.

For The Hours, Cunningham was awarded the:

• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - 1999
• PEN/Faulkner Award - 1999
• Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Book Award - 1999

External links

• Michael Cunningham's website
• Michael Cunningham at the Internet Movie Database
• 2004 article by Randy Shulman from Metro Weekly
• Yale University English Department faculty profile
• Audio: Michael Cunningham in conversation with Margaret Atwood at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2007