KASS FLEISHER WAS BORN IN WILMINGTON, DE, in 1959, and raised in the Philadelphia, PA, metro area. She holds degrees in English from Dickinson College (B.A., 1981), University of North Dakota (M.A., 1989), and Binghamton University (Ph.D., 1993). She spent four years as the administrative manager of Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet. Fleisher is the author of five books: the novel Dead Woman Hollow (forthcoming from SUNY Press), the first in a trilogy of historically inspired novels set in northern Appalachia; Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008); the documentary nonfiction work, The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History (SUNY, 2004); and two prose works that trouble the divide between fiction and memoir, The Adventurous (Factory School, 2006) and Accidental Species: A Reproduction (Chax, 2005). Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including The Iowa Review, Bombay Gin, Postmodern Culture, Z Magazine, American Book Review, and electronic book review, and her fiction has been awarded annual prizes from The Dickinson Review and Plainswoman. Yellow Medicine (coauthored with Joe Amato) advanced to the semifinal round of the 2006 Nicholl Fellowship screenplay competition, hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, while placing in the second round of the 2006 Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition. Bear River (also with Amato) was a semifinalist in the 2003 Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project fellowship competition, hosted by Paramount Pictures. Fleisher and Amato have recently adapted Amato’s novel, Big Man with a Shovel, for the screen, and completed a play, Fat Jack’s. Fleisher is the founder and publisher of Steerage Press, and teaches in the creative writing program at Illinois State University, where she also teaches courses in narrative theory, trauma narrative, and women’s literature. You can find her at ISU, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, at Wikipedia, and at Amazon.
