Bio

If you need an official media bio, here’s this:

Judith Claire Mitchell is the author of the novels The Last Day of the War and A Reunion of Ghosts, the latter the recipient of the Edna Ferber Fiction Award and a finalist for The National Jewish Book Award and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and Bread Loaf, among others. Her short fiction and essays appear in The Missouri Review, The Sun Magazine, Entropy, Another Chicago Magazine, The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, and other literary journals. As a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she taught undergraduate and graduate fiction-writing workshops among other classes, and directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Retired now, she continues to reside in Madison where she writes and works as a freelance developmental editor.

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But if you just want to know some things about me, then here’s this:

Let’s start with the name. Judith Claire Mitchell. I use all three because when you try to find me by googling plain old Judith Mitchell the results are not pretty. Also, I like the name Claire. It’s my mother’s name. I like my mother. When I see her first name printed next to mine, I feel as though I’m acknowledging all she’s done for me.

That said, I tend to go by Judy.

I was born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island. Growing up, I was the kind of kid who eschewed sunlight, preferring to stay inside and write terrible stories about cats on vacation and parakeets on the lam. I continued writing throughout my school years, even after my 7th grade guidance counselor told me that writing was not a viable career for girls and urged me to focus instead on acquiring secretarial skills because what if my husband died and I needed to support myself. I continued even after my high school English teacher told me that women writers could be competent, but never truly great because name one.

But I did stop writing after receiving a BA in English (with a specialization in creative writing) from Barnard College. Or, more accurately, I stopped writing fiction. Instead, I got what was supposed to be a temporary gig as a paralegal, first at a Wall Street law firm, and later at a firm in Providence where I drafted wills and trusts. I was unambitious, but content. My old guidance counselor would have been proud.

Then came a confluence of expected and unexpected events: a major birthday, recession-related troubles at the law firm, the death of a friend with its reminder of life’s brevity, and, on a more positive note, meeting and moving in with an artist who, every day, was (and is) involved in the creative process.

That’s when I recalled that the paralegal thing was supposed to be short term. I also thought of something my mother used to tell me. “Judy,” she’d say, “life is so full of sorrow and suffering that whenever the chance for happiness comes along, I want you to grab it with both fists.”

I started grabbing. First, I took a life-changing summer writing workshop with the amazing Pamela Painter. She told me to apply to MFA programs, so I did. I got into the Iowa Writers Workshop, so I went. After the Workshop, I was awarded a fellowship by the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, so my husband and I moved to Madison. When my fellowship year ended, I was asked to stick around and do some adjuncting. And then, upon the sale of my first novel, The Last Day of the War, the good people of UW invited me to hop on over to the tenure track. I spent 20 years, all told, as a professor in the creative writing program. I also spent some time directing the MFA program and my beloved Wisconsin Institute. My second novel, A Reunion of Ghosts, came out in 2015.

In 2018 I retired. I now spend my time writing, doing some freelance editing, and loafing, which are things hard to tell apart just by looking. My husband and I live in the woods near the UW Arboretum where we are visited frequently by small herds of deer, gazes of raccoons, passels of possums, flocks of wild turkeys, fluffles of bunnies, and annoyances of Segway explorers. Sometimes there’s a fox or two. We consider ourselves very lucky.

–JCM
January 2023