18 Facts About Lucia Berlin

Lucia Brown Berlin was an American short story writer.

Lucia Berlin had a small, devoted following, but did not reach a mass audience during her lifetime.

Lucia Berlin rose to sudden literary fame in 2015, eleven years after her death, with the publication of a volume of her selected stories, A Manual for Cleaning Women.

The family lived in mining camps in Idaho, Montana, Arizona, El Paso, Texas and Chile, where Lucia Berlin spent most of her youth.

Lucia Berlin began publishing relatively late in life, under the encouragement and sometimes tutelage of poet Ed Dorn.

Lucia Berlin was never a bestseller, but was widely influential within the literary community.

Lucia Berlin has been compared to Raymond Carver and Richard Yates.

Lucia Berlin won an American Book Award in 1991 for Homesick, and was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Up through the early 1990s, Lucia Berlin taught creative writing in a number of venues, including the San Francisco County Jail and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.

Lucia Berlin took oral histories from elderly patients at Mt.

Lucia Berlin was asked to stay on at the end of her two-year term.

Lucia Berlin was named associate professor, and continued teaching there until 2000.

Lucia Berlin has been called one of America's best kept secrets.

Lucia Berlin is one of our finest writers and here she is at the height of her powers.

Lucia Berlin is our Scheherazade, continually surprising her readers with a startling variety of voices, vividly drawn characters, and settings alive with sight and sound.

Lucia Berlin retired when her condition grew too severe to work, and she later developed lung cancer.

Lucia Berlin struggled with radiation therapy, which she said felt like having one's bones ground to dust.

Lucia Berlin died in her home in Marina del Rey, on her 68th birthday, with one of her favorite books in her hands.