Eula Biss

Eula Biss is the author of Having and Being Had (Penguin, 2020). Her first book The Balloonists (2002) was written in prose, published as poetry and reviewed as both fiction and memoir. A feminist meditation on love and the limits of romance, The Balloonists chronicles a young woman’s refusal of marriage and her attempt to live a new story. Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf 2009) is a personal exploration of whiteness and racial injustice in the United States with essays that move across time from Jim Crow lynchings to post-war white flight to contemporary gentrification. Notes from No Man’s Land won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

On Immunity: An Inoculation (Graywolf 2014) is a wide-ranging investigation of the myths and metaphors surrounding vaccination. Written from the perspective of a new mother, it explores questions raised by parenting, privilege, feminism, environmentalism, science fiction and political power. On Immunity was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. In light of our current healthcare crisis, the issues addressed in On Immunity have an even greater relevance for us today.

Biss’s work has been translated into over ten languages and has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library, and a Pushcart Prize. Her essays and poems have recently appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, Harper’s, and the New York Times magazine. Biss holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and has taught writing at Northwestern University for fifteen years.