Author Profile: Steve Stern is an author from Memphis, Tennessee.
Name: Steve Stern
Timeline:
2010 – The Frozen Rabbi
2012 – The Book of Mischief
1999 – The Wedding Jester
1986 – Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven
2015 – The Pinch
Background: Steve Stern is born on 21st December 1947 in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. He is 72 years of age. Steve Stern completed his education at the University of Arkansas in 1976. Steve Stern teaches at Skidmore College. He presently resides in Ballston Spa, New York.
Son of a grocer, Steve Stern left Memphis to attend college in the 1960s. Later he travelled to Europe and the United States where he led a wayward life of his generation for around ten years and ending in the Ozarks in a hippie commune. He continued writing in the graduate program at the University of Arkansas. There were a number of other notable writers who became prominent over the years, including the fiction writers, Jack Butler, Ellen Gilchrist, Lee K. Abbott and Lewis Nordan as well as poet C.D. Wright who became prominent who studied during the graduate program.
Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter was his first published book in 1983 which was based in The Pinch. Isaac and the Undertaker’s Daughter won the Pushcart Writers’ Choice Award.
Genre: Steve Stern’s genre is Fiction. His fiction work is more suffused with Judaic mysticism and Jewish folklore.
Literary Contributions: Steve Stern has won the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada. Steve also won two Pushcart Prize Awards and the O.Henry Award. He also published more collections including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven which got the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction. He published a novel Harry Kalpan’s Adventures Underground. His collection, The Wedding Jester won the National Jewish Book Award in the year 1999. The Angel of Forgetfulness, his novel was named by The Washington Post as one of the best books of 2005.
As author Steve Stern has won notable scholarly awards including the Guggenheim Foundations Fellowship and also the Fullbright Fellowships.
Unique Stylistic Features: A major part of Steve Stern’s work draws inspiration from Yiddish folklore. Stern went to London and in his thirties returned to Memphis where he worked at a local folklore centre. He studied about The Pinch, the city’s old Jewish ghetto and started to steep himself towards Yiddish folklore. Naughty Professor, his latest novel was published in 2015 in The Pinch.