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About the author
Nora Gallagher's memoir Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith received outstanding reviews from the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times among many others. Annie Dillard called it " a wonderful book" and said, "Nora Gallagher...describes church life and spiritual life with absolute accuracy." The book was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. Her second memoir, Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work Doubt, Discernment and Moments of Grace has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Her essays, book reviews and journalism have appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, DoubleTake, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Utne Reader, The Village Voice, Mother Jones, and The Los Angeles Times.
Ms. Gallagher has received fellowships from the Wesleyan Writers Conference, 1992 (Barach Fellow, nonfiction); Blue Mountain Center, New York, (twice, 1995 and 2000); the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, (twice1996 and 2002); and the Mesa Refuge, Pt. Reyes, California,1999.
Her readings and lectures include the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University; St. Mary's College, Moraga, CA; St. Mark's Cathedral, Seattle WA; All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena, CA; and the Quest Project (Methodist Bishops Annual Retreat), San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Her reportage has appeared in Time magazine, Life magazine, The Washington Post-Style Section, The Detroit Free Press, and The Santa Barbara Independent.
She is the editor of the award-winning Notes from the Field, published by Chronicle Books, 1999, a collection of literary essays on the outdoors by Paul Theroux, Gretel Ehrlich, Russell Chatham, Rick Ridgeway, Tom McGuane, Rick Bass, and Tom Brokaw among others. Ms. Gallagher was assistant editor of a collection of women's diaries, Revelations: Diaries of Women (Random House, 1974).
After college (St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico where the curriculum is a four -year liberal arts education based on the Great Books), Ms. Gallagher worked as a free-lance magazine journalist in San Francisco. She was the lead stringer for Time Magazine's West Coast bureau. The seventies in San Francisco provided a rich ground for someone learning to be a reporter: she covered the Hearst and Dan White trials in the city, the so-called gay riots, and the beginning of what would become the AIDS crisis. As well as working for Time, she published longer stories in the Village Voice (an analysis of the Dan White verdict) and the New York Times Magazine (a profile of the men and women who survived the Jonestown mass suicide.)
In the early eighties she published an article in Mother Jones about AIDS and what dividing people into healthy and unhealthy sexual partners might mean to us morally, a step toward combining essay and reporting. A later essay on money, baby boomers and ambivalence, published in the Santa Barbara weekly paper The Independent, was reprinted in the Utne Reader and elsewhere.
Wary of sentimentalizing or over-generalizing her middle-class life, she started looking for ideas farther abroad. In the late eighties, she visited Nicaragua, and wrote about the daily lives of people in the waning days of the Sandinista Revolution, then went on to Czechoslovakia, shortly after the Velvet Revolution where she wrote an article about the effect on families of the atmosphere created by the secret police and another on a newly elected member of parliament accused of collaboration. Ms. Gallagher is particularly interested in what happens to ordinary people in the shadow of larger events.
She assigns and edits environmental essays for Patagonia, Inc. an outdoor clothing manufacturer that gives 1% of its profits to the environment. She lives in Santa Barbara with her husband, the novelist, Vincent Stanley.
Ms. Gallagher is represented by Philippa Brophy at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. 65 Bleecker Street, New York. N.Y. 10012.\
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