Lexington, Kentucky
Barrie Jean Borich is the author of Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press/American Lives Series), winner of a Lambda Literary Award in Memoir, an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) Gold Medal in Essay/Creative Nonfiction and an IndieFab Bronze Award for Essays. In a starred review Kirkus called Body Geographic “an elegant literary map that celebrates shifting topographies as well as human bodies in motion, not only across water and land, but also through life.”
Borich’s previous book, My Lesbian Husband (Graywolf), won the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award. Her work has been cited in Best American Essays and Best American Non-Required Reading, she’s the recipient of The Florida Review Editor’s Prize in the Essay and the Crab Orchard Review Literary Nonfiction Prize, and her work has appeared in Ecotone, The Seneca Review, Indiana Review, Hotel Amerika, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, and many anthologies including After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essay (University of Georgia), Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury), Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton), and the forthcoming Waveform: 21st Century Essays by Women (University of Georgia).
Borich teaches creative writing and nonfiction literature classes at DePaul University in Chicago, and edits Slag Glass City a digital journal of the urban essay arts. She is also a faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program of Pacific Lutheran University. A far south side of Chicago native, Borich spent many years living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has now returned to the city where she was born, living with longtime beloved Linnea in Boystown-South East Lakeview, the first officially recognized gayborhood in the United States, where she’s working on a book-length essay called Oh, What A Beautiful City, about urban joy, remembering and remaking in the postindustrial metropolis, and riding her bicycle on the mean streets of Chicago.