Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval (born 1956) is an American poet, memoirist, translator and fiction writer. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of numerous books, notably Building Fiction, The Museum of Happiness, Space and Underground Women.
Biography
Kercheval was born in Fontainebleau, France, to American parents. Raised in Cocoa, Florida, she attended Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, where she studied with Janet Burroway, David Kirby, and Jerome Stern. She received her Bachelor of Arts in history at the university in 1983.
Kercheval earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1986. She then taught at DePauw University in Indiana for a year.
Since 1987, she was a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She was the founding director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, the Zona Gale Professor of English, and the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She lives in Wisconsin.
Short stories
Kercheval's first published book, a collection of short stories titled The Dogeater, won the Associated Writing Programs Award in Short Fiction in 1987. It was reprinted with additional material as Underground Women in 2019.
Kercheval's one-page short short story, Carpathia, first published in Jerome Stern's Micro Fiction (1996), is widely anthologized and used in creative writing texts. It is the story of a married couple on board the Carpathia, the ship that rescued passengers from the Titanic.
Novels
Kercheval's first novel is The Museum of Happiness, a story about a young widow and a half-Alsatian, half-German carnival worker falling in love in Paris in 1929. A German translation was published by Wilhelm Heyne Verlag in 1997. The Museum of Happiness was reissued by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2003.
Her 2007 novel-in-stories The Alice Stories won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. "By turns hilarious and devastating, The Alice Stories form a tender and poetic chronicle of one woman's journey through time, love, motherhood, and Wisconsin. It is a marvelous example of how connected stories can, even more effectively than a novel, evoke a life in all its ranging, episodic, and emotional complexity."
Her 2010 novella Brazil follows Paulo, a 19-year-old Miami bellboy, and Claudia, a 40-something Hungarian refugee, on a road trip. "The novella is set in the late 1980s, and its opening scenes take place in Miami during the era of Miami Vice, when South Beach was still tacky enough to provide an interesting springboard for a story like this one. However, Brazil doesn't linger in Miami for long; instead it roams from Florida to Wisconsin in a shiny black BMW."
Kercheval's 2013 novel My Life as a Silent Movie centers around the life of 42-year-old Emma, who flies to Paris after losing her husband and daughter in an auto accident. She then discovers that she has a twin brother whose existence she had not known about, and learns that her birth parents weren't the Americans who raised her, but a White Russian film star of the 1920s and a French Stalinist. The novel won the 2013 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.
Nonfiction
Space is Kercheval's memoir about her childhood and the Space Race. It was first published by Algonquin Books in 1998, and has been reissued several times.
The writing textbook Building Fiction:How to Develop Plot and Structure was published in 1997 by Story Press and reissued by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Press. It discusses sources for fiction, openings, points-of-view, characters and endings. It also discusses novels, novellas, novels-in-stories and short stories.
Poetry
Kercheval has published seven collections of poetry and numerous chapbooks. The first collection was World as Dictionary (1999), and the latest is I Want to Tell You (2023), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Since 2011 she has written poems in Spanish which have been published in Uruguay in the books Torres and Extranjera as well as in U.S. literary magazines.
Translations
Kercheval has published translations from Spanish of the Uruguayan poets Circe Maia, Agustín Lucas, Fabián Severo, Luis Bravo, Laura Cesarco Eglin, Javier Etchevarren, Tatiana Oroño and Idea Vilariño. She has edited or co-edited the bilingual anthologies América invertida: an anthology of emerging Uruguayan poets and Trusting on the wide air: poems of Uruguay.
Awards
Her memoir, Space, won the Alex Award from the American Library Association. The Dogeater won the Associated Writing Programs Award 1986 in Short Fiction. The Alice Stories won the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize. Her novella, Brazil, was the winner of the Ruthanne Wiley Memorial Novella Contest. David Wojahn selected her poetry collection Cinema Muto for the Crab Orchard Open Selection Award. Her chapbook Film History as a Train Wreck was chosen by Albert Goldbarth as the winner of the 2006 Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Prize. And Ilya Kaminsky chose America, that Island off the coast of France as the 2017 winner of the Dorset Prize.
Works (as author, translator, or editor)
The Dogeater, short stories, (1987)
The Museum of Happiness, novel, (1993)
Building Fiction: How To Develop Plot and Structure, textbook, (1997)
Space: A Memoir, (1998)
World as Dictionary, poetry, (1999)
Dog Angel, poetry, (2004)
Chartreuse, poetry chapbook, (2005)
Film History as Train Wreck, poetry, (2006)
The Alice Stories, short stories, (2007)
Cinema Muto, poetry, (2009)
Brazil, novella, (2010)
My Life as a Silent Movie, novel, (2013)
Torres/Towers, poetry chapbook, (2014)
Extranjera = Stranger, poetry, (2015) and
The invisible bridge = El puente invisible, translation, (2015)
América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets, editor, (2016)
Tierra, cielo y agua: antología de poesía medio ambiental = Earth, water and sky: an anthology of environmental poetry, editor, (2016)
Confiado a un amplio aire = Trusting on the Wide Air, co-editor, (2019)
Underground Women, short stories, (2019)
Jabko, poetry chapbook, (2019)
America that island off the coast of France, poetry, (2019)
Volver en tinta = Reborn in Ink, co-editor & co-translator, (2019)
Fábula de un hombre desconsolado = Fable of an Inconsolable Man, translator, (2019)
Mis Razones: mujeres poetas del Uruguay, co-editor, (2019)
Year by Year: a life, poetry chapbook, (2019)
Confiado a un amplio aire = Trusting on the Wide Air, co-editor, (2019)
Poemas de Amor = Love Poems, translator, (2020)
Naturaleza muerta con derrotas = Still Life With Defeats, translator, (2020)
Noite nu Norte = Night in the North, co-editor & co-translator, (2020)
La voz y la sombra = Voice and Shadow, co-editor & co-translator, (2020)
Still life with defeats = Naturaleza muerta con derrotas, translator, (2020)
La crisis es el cuerpo, poetry, (2021)
I Want to Tell You, poetry, (2023)
Memoria y Reescritura = Memory Rewritten, co-editor & co-translator, (2023)
Flores Raras [escondido país] poesía de mujeres uruguayas, co-editor, (2023)
References
1956 births
Living people
20th-century American novelists
21st-century American novelists
American women short story writers
American women poets
American women novelists
Florida State University alumni
Spanish–English translators
University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty
Novelists from Florida
20th-century American women writers
21st-century American women writers
20th-century American poets
21st-century American poets
20th-century American translators
21st-century American translators
Chapbook writers
20th-century American short story writers
21st-century American short story writers
People from Cocoa, Florida
Novelists from Wisconsin
American women academics
Women memoirists