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The 2004 Rea Award Jurors Edwidge Danticat, Adam Haslett, and Amy Hempel offer the following citation in choosing Lorrie Moore for the award:
Over the course of the last two decades Lorrie Moore has earned a place among the finest writers in this country by exploring the lives of modern women and men, many of them in the Midwest, as they confront the often absurd indignities of ordinary life, most particularly the quest for love and companionship. Her short stories have charted this territory with unfailing intelligence, an almost miraculous wit, and remarkable depth of feeling. Her prose is at once supple and sharp, hilarious and heartrending, and it has come to constitute an unmistakable prose style all her own. Like all great writers, she has managed to bring the pathos of her characters down into the very grammar of her sentences, and as a result her mature work has a generous, open, pellucid quality and a wonderful unexpectedness. It is the work of a writer who has mastered her art. Lorrie Moore’s stories are gifts, for her hard won, no doubt, but for her readers, pure pleasure.
Lorrie Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York in 1957. She attended St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where she tutored on an Indian reservation, and was editor of the university literary magazine and, at age 19, won Seventeen Magazine’s Fiction Contest. After graduating summa cum laude, she worked in New York for two years before going on to received a Masters in Fine Arts from Cornell University.
In 1985, her first collection of short stories, Self Help, was published by Knopf, producing reviews comparing her to everyone from Grace Paley to Woody Allen. Subsequent books include Anagrams [1986], Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? [994], Birds of America [1998], Like Life [1990], and The Forgotten Helper [1997], a children’s book. She has edited I Know Some Things: Contemporary Stories About Children Viewing The World [1992] and The Best American Short Stories 2004.
Lorrie Moore has been the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Irish Time International Prize for Fiction, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her stories and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books as well as other periodicals, and in annuals such as The O’Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike
She has been a Professor at the University of Wisconsin since 1984, where she is currently Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities.
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