Jesse Lee Kercheval

Jesse Lee Kercheval (born 1956) is an American poet, memoirist, translator, fiction writer and visual artist. 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, and she is a translator of Uruguayan poetry.
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 has been 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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. A selection of her English-language poetry was translated into Spanish and published bilingually in Argentina in 2020 and in Uruguay in 2023.
Kercheval has published translations from Spanish of the Uruguayan poets Circe Maia, Silvia Guerra, Mariella Nigro, 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, Trusting on the wide air: poems of Uruguay and Flores Raras, a Spanish-only anthology of Uruguayan women poets born between 1845 and 1939.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Kercheval took up drawing because she “wanted to do something that wasn’t just sitting on the computer reading bad news all day”. Her drawings have been published as graphic narratives in literary magazines, notably Image, New Letters (Editor’s Choice Award, Winter/Spring 2022) and the New Ohio Review (winner of the 2022 Nonfiction Contest). Her graphic memoir French Girl was published by Fieldmouse Press in 2024.
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. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and translation.