About the Author: Judith Frank
Judith Frank
Current Home:
Amherst, MA
Place of Birth:
Chicago, IL
Education:
B.A. Hebrew University of Jerusalem
MFA and Ph.D., Cornell University
Why did you choose to come to Amherst?
This was the job I got! (And I was the department’s second choice for it, too.)
Awards and Prizes:
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 2008; Lambda Literary Award, 2005 (Lesbian Debut Fiction, for Crybaby Butch); Finalist, Benjamin Franklin Award, Independent Book Publishers Association, for Crybaby Butch, 2005
Favorite book:
Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Colm Toíbín’s The Master
Tips for aspiring writers:
Talent is only a piece of the equation: you need the discipline and commitment to sit down and face your fears and write on a regular basis, and you need to be able to tolerate a fair amount of criticism and disappointment as well.
My path to becoming a writer:
When I began the Ph.D. program in English at Cornell, coming from undergraduate work in Israel, I didn’t know there was such thing as an MFA. I became friends with MFA students and quickly became jealous of them. I took a workshop and was admitted into that program. When I got my job at Amherst as a scholar of the early English novel, I naively thought that I’d do both scholarly research and fiction writing. But scholarship was so hard, and demanded so much of me, I had to abandon fiction writing for a while. I wrote a book about the English satiric novel in the eighteenth century and got tenure, and from that point – from the safety of that vantage point – I decided that I didn’t have the drive to write another scholarly book, that I wanted to be writing in a different mode for a broader audience, and that my passion lay with fiction writing. I haven’t looked back.