Deirdre McNamer

Image of Deirdre McNamer
Fiction

Deirdre McNamer is the author of five novels: Aviary, Red Rover, My Russian, One Sweet Quarrel, and Rima in the Weeds.

Biography

McNamer is the author of five novels: Rima in the Weeds (HarperCollins, 1991), One Sweet Quarrel (HarperCollins, 1994), My Russian (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and Red Rover (Viking, 2007), which was named to the Best Books of 2007 lists of Artforum, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. It also won that year’s Montana Book Award. Her most recent novel is Aviary. Her essays, short fiction, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Outside, among other venues.

She has taught writing at Cornell University, Williams College, the University of Ohio, the University of Oregon, the University of Alabama, and the University of Montana, where she has been, since 1998, a core faculty member of the MFA program. She is a recipient of a 2015 Artist’s Innovation Award from the Montana Arts Council. She chaired the fiction panel of the National Book Awards in 2011 and was a judge for the 2015 PEN/Faulkner award.