Patricia Hampl first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her memoir about her Czech heritage, which was awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1981. A new edition, with a post-revolution afterword, appeared in 1992. She also has two collections of poetry, Woman before an Aquarium, and Resort and Other Poems. In 1987 she published Spillville, a meditation on Antonin Dvorak's summer in Iowa, with engravings by Steven Sorman. Her most recent book is Virgin Time (1992, paperback 1993), a memoir about her Catholic upbringing and an inquiry into contemplative life.
In 1999, W.W. Norton published her new book, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory, as well as a new edition of A Romantic Education with a new "Afterword" in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.
Her fiction, poems, reviews, essays, and travel pieces have appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, New York Times Book Review, Ploughshares, Antaeus, Granta, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ironwood, Ms., Best American Short Stories, Los Angeles Times, The Sophisticated Traveller, and Kenyon Review.
Patricia Hampl has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bush Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (twice, in poetry and prose), Ingram Merrill Foundation, and Djerassi Foundation. She was Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Literature at Carleton College, Fall, 1987; Emens Distinguished Professor at Ball State University, Spring, 1989; and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Writing at the University of Iowa, Spring 1994. Hampl was a resident fellow at the Bellagio Study Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy, Fall 1991. She has received honorary doctorates from the College of St. Catherine, the University of St. Thomas, and Luther College. Her last three books have been named "Notable Books" of the year by The New York Times Book Review. In 1990 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.
Her essay, "A Week in the Word," first published in Image, is included in Best American Essays 1999. Her short story "The Bill Collector's Vacation," was awarded a 1999 Pushcart Prize.
Ms. Hampl is the editor of Burning Bright, an anthology of sacred poetry of the West (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) from Ballantine Books (1995). She is the editor as well of The Houghton Mifflin Anthology of Short Fiction (1989). She has written the screenplay for a feature film of Spillville (Robin Burke Productions).
In 1995 she was a Fulbright Fellow in Prague, Czech Republic. Hampl is Regents' Professor and also McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis where she teaches in the MFA program of the English Department. She is also on the permanent faculty of The Prague Summer Seminars. In 1995 and 1996 she was on the faculty of the Breadloaf Writers Conference to which she returns in 1999 and 2000. She is co-editor with Carl Klaus of the newly established Iowa Non-Fiction Series from the University of Iowa Press.
Patricia Hampl's essay, "A Week in the Word," appeared in Image #19. Not only was this essay chosen for The Best American Essays 1999 (Houghton Mifflin), but it was also recently selected for the forthcoming Best of the Best American Essays, an anthology that will collect the best work from the series' fourteen year history.
Read Hampl's essay, "A Week in the Word" which appeared in Image #19.
Patricia Hampl's Current Projects
"I recently finished writing a long essay for an anthology of American Catholic writers writing on the sacraments edited by Thomas Grady. I chose the sacrament of Penance (aka Confession or, more recently, Reconciliation). It was a fascinating project, the historical research in particular which made clear the enormous, if glacial, changes that the sacrament has made over the centuries. I'm now turning toward fiction, and working on a collection of short stories. In addition to my own writing, I'm engaged with a lively group headquartered at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis to launch an ambitious (we think) new magazine late in the year 2000. The title is JUNCTION. Our vision is to publish a magazine that is the crossroads of literature and journalism, a bimonthly that will represent the best in strongly-voiced non-fiction as well as a gathering of fiction and poetry. I have other projects on the horizon, both fiction and non-fiction books, but maybe it's unwise to claim too much too soon."
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