Mary Gordon is the author of nine novels, including Final Payments, The Love of My Youth, Pearl, There Your Heart Lies, and Payback; seven works of nonfiction, including the memoirs Circling My Mother and The Shadow Man; and four collections of short fiction, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received a Lila Acheson Wallace Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007. She is Professor Emerita at Barnard College and lives in New York City.