Michelle Hoover is an American writer and college instructor. She is the author of The Quickening a 2010 novel. She was born in Ames, Iowa, but currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She was selected as the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University. She has taught writing at Boston University and, since 2014, teaches at Brandeis University as the Fannie Hurst writer-in-residence. She also teaches at GrubStreet, where she co-founded the Novel Incubator program. She has an M.F.A. from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2014 she was selected as the National Endowment of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship. Hoover is a contributor to the Best New American Voices anthology. She has also published short stories and novel excerpts in literary journals, including Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, Story Quarterly, and The Massachusetts Review. In 2005 she won the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. The Quickening was based on her own family history and a journal her grandmother, Melva Current, wrote during the Great Depression. It was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, was a finalist for the Indies Choice Debut in 2010, Forward Magazine's Best Literary Book of 2010, and was a 2010 Massachusetts Book Award "Must Read" pick. Poets and Writers magazine picked The Quickening as one of its Top 5 Debut novels in 2010.
At MacDowell in 2003, she completed revisions on her first novel, The History of Flight, and returned to her work on an older, second novel, The Swallow and the Nightingale, a chapter of which will be appearing in "Best New American Voices 2004". During her 2005 residency, she finished work on her novel, The Quickening.
