A. G. Mojtabai

A.G. MOJTABAI BIO:

A.G. Mojtabai, (Grace), has published 13 books. She was raised on the East Coast, spent years in the Middle East, and for the last three decades, has lived on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle, where many of her stories are situated.

Mojtabai has taught at a number of well known institutions, including Harvard University, New York University and the University of Tulsa. She has been a recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lillian Smith Award for the best book about the American South, the Rosenthal Award in Literature (1983), and the Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1993), both from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mojtabai calls her decision to leave the East Coast for the heartland a “hinge” enabling a major turning in her life and it remains an enduring influence. Her journey is recorded in Blessed Assurance: At Home with the Bomb in Amarillo, Texas. It remains her best-known book, taught in ethnography, American political history, and religious studies.

Mojtabai’s literary development was not typical. At an early age she began dissection on her own, and in high school she was tracked for science. It has been suggested that her approach to character in her novels resembles that of dissection. Layer after layer of superficial presentation is peeled away to reveal where the person really lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1) Mundome (1974)

2) 400 Eels of Sigmund Freud (1976)

3) A Stopping Place (1979)

4) Autumn (1982)

5) Blessed Assurance (1986)

6) Ordinary Time (1989)

7) Called Out (1994)

8) Soon- Tales from Hospice (1998)

9) All That Road Going (2008)

10) Parts of a World (2011)

11) Shine On Me (2016)

12) Thirst (2021)

13) Featherless (2024)