Background
Eula Biss was born on August 9, 1977, in Rochester, New York, United States. She is a daughter of Roger Biss, a doctor, and Ellen Biss, maiden name Graf, an artist.
2009
Eula Biss talks about her book Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays.
2014
Eula Biss at home with her son Juneau.
2014
Eula Biss and her son Juneau.
2014
Eula Biss, editor, educator, writer, author.
2014
Eula Biss, editor, educator, writer, author.
2015
Eula Biss, editor, educator, writer, author.
2017
Natasha Martin, Seattle University's Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, engages with the author Eula Biss.
Eula Biss, editor, educator, writer, author.
Eula Biss, editor, educator, writer, author.
893 West Street Amherst, MA 01002, United States
Eula Biss received a Bachelor of Arts from Hampshire College.
Iowa City, Iowa 52242, United States
Eula Biss received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.
(Eula Biss's The Balloonists is a multi-faceted essay abou...)
Eula Biss's The Balloonists is a multi-faceted essay about the dissolution of marriage and the recovery of memory and family. Interweaving her own story with fragmentary narratives of exploration, youth, and loss, Biss creates an unforgettable work of wreckage and resilience.
https://www.amazon.com/Balloonists-Eula-Biss-ebook/dp/B00R13ICWW/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=eula+biss&qid=1587465284&sr=8-3
2002
(A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial id...)
A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays - teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004OA648O/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1
2009
(Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear-fear of t...)
Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear-fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in your child's air, food, mattress, medicine, and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world. In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears about vaccines, Biss researches what they mean for her own child, her immediate community, America, and the world, both historically and in the present moment. She extends a conversation with other mothers to meditations on Voltaire's Candide, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On Immunity is a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KUY4D7W/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
2014
(A timely and arresting new look at affluence by a consist...)
A timely and arresting new look at affluence by a consistently surprising writer "My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts," Eula Biss writes, "the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after." Having just purchased her first home, she now embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The result is a radical interrogation of work, leisure, and capitalism. Described by The New York Times as a writer who "advances from all sides, like a chess player," Biss brings her approach to the lived experience of capitalism. Playfully ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, across bars and laundromats and universities, she asks, of both herself and her class, "In what have we invested?"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084FMXLN5/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i2
2020
Eula Biss was born on August 9, 1977, in Rochester, New York, United States. She is a daughter of Roger Biss, a doctor, and Ellen Biss, maiden name Graf, an artist.
Eula Biss received a Bachelor of Arts in non-fiction writing from Hampshire College in 1999. She received a Master of Fine Arts in non-fiction writing from the University of Iowa. She earned an undergraduate degree in non-fiction under the mentorship of three poets: Martin Espada, Deborah Gorlin, and Paul Jenkins.
In 2000-2002, Eula Bliss was a teacher at the Dream Yard Project. In 2001-2002, she taught at V-Day Youth Initiative. From 2002, she has been writing. She began writing nonfiction by writing poetry. Biss's first book, The Balloonists, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2002. She teaches non-fiction writing at Northwestern University and is a co-editor of Essay Press, which was founded in 2006 by Eula Biss, Stephen Cope, and Catherine Taylor. Bliss is a contributor of poetry and essays to periodicals, including Both, Massachusetts Review, Rattapallax, Hanging Loose, and Race Traitor. Her essays have recently appeared in The Believer, Harper's, and The New York Times Magazine. She gives readings of her works throughout the northeastern United States. Eula Biss's new book Having and Being Had will be published in September 2020.
(A timely and arresting new look at affluence by a consist...)
2020(A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial id...)
2009(Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear-fear of t...)
2014(Eula Biss's The Balloonists is a multi-faceted essay abou...)
2002Genre designation doesn’t matter very much to Eula Biss, as a writer or a reader. She thinks a genre is as much a lie as gender is. But she wears the clothes of a particular gender and, as a writer, she wears the clothes of nonfiction. She likes how vast and messy and difficult to define the essay tradition is, and she has always been drawn, even in poetry, to information and argument. Her relationship to information as an essayist is something like the poet's relationship to received form - the imperative to be accurate in nonfiction can be a productive formal constraint, not unlike the imperative to work within fourteen lines in a sonnet or within seventeen syllables in a haiku. As a teacher, she sometimes talks about sub-genres of nonfiction as a pedagogical tool to help students think about certain features of the work we are studying, but she understands sub-genres, like genres, as false categories. Eula Biss is not much more comfortable with gender as a category than she is with a genre as a category. And it is probably her experience with a gender that makes her suspicious of a genre. She is frequently uneasy in the category of woman, but her living experience of being received as a woman has informed her writing. In particular, sexism has been an important template for helping her understand racism.
In her book On Immunity, Biss sympathizes with parents who fear vaccines, and she understands the cultural roots of their hesitation, which include an insistence on bodily independence; an obsession with physical purity, free from chemicals; and even a kind of pre-industrial nostalgia that casts vaccines as newfangled and unnatural.
Quotations: "On my twentieth birthday, I wrote a list of things to do that year. The first was: learn how to talk. I sat in silence under a flickering lightbulb before going out in the boat with my father, where we sat in silence. On my twenty-first birthday I wrote another list that also began with: learn how to talk. I recognized that my silence was a liability. I was perceived to be meek, weak, and willing. My answer was to write. By my twenty-second birthday I had written my first book and had, to some extent, learned how to talk."
Eula Biss has always understood herself as part of a collective. She comes from a big family that became, as she grew up, even bigger and more diverse. Being part of the family taught her, in many ways, how to be part of a community. And being part of a community, various communities, has shaped both her politics and aesthetics.
Every aspect of Eula Bliss's life, from her finances to her friendships, to the moments of personal joy and despair, have been shaped by her work. Biss is the sort of writer who likes to think her way toward her conclusions.
Eula Biss is married to John Bresland, and they have a son Juneau (2009).