Tara Ison

Tara Ison is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She is the author of three novels: The List, A Child out of Alcatraz, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Rockaway, featured as one of the "Best Books of Summer" in O, the Oprah Magazine, July 2013. Ball, a short story collection, was published in 2015, and her collection of essays, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies, was winner of the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her short fiction, essays, poetry and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, BOMB, Salon, Electric Literature, the Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, Nerve.com, Black Clock, TriQuarterly, the Mississippi Review, the Santa Monica Review, Publishers Weekly, the Week, LA Weekly, O, the Oprah Magazine, and numerous anthologies.

Ison received her MFA in fiction and literature from Bennington College. She is currently professor of fiction in Arizona State University's creative writing program. In another life, she was the cowriter of the cult classic film Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991).