Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott has, in the words of The New York Times, “staked an impressive claim on a subject matter and a turf—Irish American Catholic families congregated, for the most part, in New York City and its suburbs on Long Island.” Her seven works of fiction include At Weddings and Wakes, Charming Billy, and Child of My Heart: A Novel. Her most recent book, Someone, follows the everyday rhythms in the life of Marie, an ordinary Irish-American girl from Brooklyn in the 1930s, of which she said, “Setting the story there—not in the literal, geographical Brooklyn but in the one of memory, of romanticized recollection—is my way of visiting a place that I suspect never really existed.”

McDermott currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University as the Richard A. Macksey Professor of Humanities.