Joanna Scott

Scott has received critical acclaim for her novels. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She received an honorary doctor of letters degree from Trinity College (Connecticut) in 2009.

Her stories have been included in Best American Stories (1993) and The Pushcart Prize (1993). In 1992 she won the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for her story "A Borderline Case." In 2006 she won the Ambassador Book Award for her novel Liberation. Her books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN-Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Scott received her master's degree from Brown University in 1985 and taught creative writing there, as well as at the University of Maryland and Princeton University. Since 1987 she has been in the English Department of the University of Rochester, where she has taught courses in creative writing, modern fiction, the contemporary novel, the writing of Charles Dickens and other subjects. She also sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.

Scott grew up in Darien, Connecticut, and received her bachelor's degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1983. Before graduating, she spent a year in an exchange program at Barnard College. She also worked as a copy editor for United Features Syndicate in New York City and spent a year at the Elaine Markson Literary Agency. There she was an assistant to Geri Thoma, who later became Scott's own agent.

She is married to James Longenbach, a poet, critic and fellow professor at the University of Rochester. Like Scott, he is also a graduate of Trinity College (Class of 1981). They have two children.

Joanna Scott (born 1960) is an American author and Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English at the University of Rochester.