Background

Julie Checkoway was born on July 15, 1963, Newburyport, Massachusetts, United States. She is a daughter of Joseph Abraham Checkoway, a mechanic, and Bernice Irene Checkoway, a homemaker.

Julie has an elder brother.

Education

Julie Checkoway graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Then, she attended the Iowa Writers Workshop and two years later obtained a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. Finally, she gained a Master of Arts degree at the Johns Hopkins University in 1989.

Career

The start of Julie Checkoway’s career was related to teaching. She began as an instructor at Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1987. The following year, she shifted to the Johns Hopkins University where she worked as an instructor for Writing Seminars from 1988 to 1995. Then, Checkoway occupied the post of an assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia, Athens.

All this time, she simultaneously worked on her writings which appeared in anthologies, such as ‘Best American Short Stories’ of 1991, ‘Silences’ of 1996 issued by the University of Heidelberg Press and ‘The Creative Woman’s Survival Guide’ published by the University of Georgia Press.

A turning point in her career became her teaching at Hebei Teachers University in Shijiazhuang, China at the end of 1980s. Living and working in the country, Checkoway gathered materials for her debut book, ‘Little Sister: Searching for the Shadow World of Chinese Women’, published in 1996.

In 2001, Checkoway left the University of Houston where she taught and headed the creative writing program. While working on the radio for Morning Edition program by NPR and This American Life by PRI, the writer was impressed by the story of the artist Billy Pappas. She created the documentary ‘Watch Waiting for Hockney’, featuring Pappas, in 2008.

The second book of Julie Checkoway, ‘The Three-Year Swim Club’ was published seven years later.

In addition, Julie Checkoway works as an editor and contributes stories to periodicals, including ‘North American Review’, ‘Iowa Review’, ‘Threepenny Review’, and ‘Harvard Advocate’.

Nowadays, the author lives and works in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Achievements

• Julie Checkoway is an accomplished writer and documentary moviemaker whose books are recognized both by critics and readers.
  
  She has been a nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, Martha Albrand Award by PEN American Center, the Pushcart Prize. She was a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1995-1997.
  
  The writings by Checkoway has been published in The New York Times, Salt Lake Tribune, and Huffington Post.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Little Sister: Searching for the Shadow World of Chinese Women

    (A memoir of a year in a large industrial Chinese city rec...)

    1996
  • The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

    (The New York Times bestselling inspirational story of imp...)

    2015

• movie

  • Watch Waiting for Hockney

    (An engaging documentary about a Baltimore artist Billy Pa...)

    2008

Views

Quotations: "I wrote my first book after living and teaching in China, where I met a group of powerful Chinese women who took the risk to tell me their stories."

"I have to balance teaching, administration, and writing, so I write in the mornings, before work, sketching out my projects. Most projects are completed in the summertime."

"All writers struggle at some point with the problem of balance between authority and involvement, seduction and revelation. Specifically, beginning writers wonder how much description to employ, and more advanced writers ask how much plot is too much or too little. And there is no better place to find answers than in the Victoria's Secret catalogue –or in any ad for lingerie – where the arts of seduction and revelation are so successfully practiced. After all, the secret of the effective lingerie ad is the secret of effective storytelling--to provide, moment by moment, the illusion of imminent expose, to give the viewer (read: reader) the uncanny sense that something fundamentally compelling is always just about to be revealed."

"A related question is where in time to begin. Should you begin far back in a character's past and move forward, or should you begin in the present and make use of flashbacks only where necessary? ... If the material with which you want to open the story is from the character's deep past, then there has to be an important relationship between what has happened in the past and what is about to happen. In other words, is the material with which you open the story an arrow pointing toward the unified effect?"

Membership

• Modem Language Association of America , United States

• Southern Modern Language Association , United States

Connections

Julie Checkoway married a teacher Laurence Lee Thomsen on June 22, 1996. They have two daughters.

Father:

Joseph Abraham Checkoway

Mother:

Bernice Irene Checkoway

husband:

Laurence Lee Thomsen