Marilyn Moriarty received her doctorate from the University of California, Irvine, with a dissertation on Shakespeare and a second emphasis in literary theory. She compiled the text of two Shakespeare plays for drama anthologies and co-edited a collection of essays on postmodern architecture. She is the author of Writing Science through Critical Thinking, a scientific writing textbook, and Moses Unchained, which won the Associated Writing Programs Creative Nonfiction Award. Her essays have been published in The Antioch Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Creative Nonfiction, The Kenyon Review, Raritan, River Teeth, and others. Three have been named “Notable” by editors of the Best American Essays series.
She won the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal for the essay. Her stories have won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, the Peregrine Prize for fiction, and the University of Utah novella contest. Her memoir, What a House Remembers, What a War Forgets, is due out in 2024.
Areas of Expertise
Shakespeare
Literary Theory
Literature of the Holocaust
Creative Nonfiction
Courses Taught
Creative NonFiction
Holocaust Literature
Literary History and Theory I
Literature of the Renaissance
Major British Writers I and II
Medieval Literature
Monsters and Marvels
Roots of Modern Drama
Global Shakespeare
Madness in Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Bookshelf
Shakespeare and the Theater
Shakespeare’s Kings and Clowns
Shakespeare’s Rome
Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Shakespeare’s Women
The Stranger in Shakespeare
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dramatic Literature
Talking Animals
Textual Construction of Gender
[Writing about] Three Genres
Topics in Literary Theory: Representation
The Wild Child (short term)
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Irvine 1990
M.A. University of Florida 1980
B.A. University of Florida 1976
Merit certificate, linguistics. Edinburgh University (Scotland)
Publications & Articles
BOOKS
Moses Unchained, memoir. University of Georgia Press. March 1998. AWP award for Creative Nonfiction.
Writing Science through Critical Thinking. Jones and Bartlett Publishers. Preliminary editions 1995, 1996; final edition June 1997.
EDITIONS
Co-Editor, Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture. With William Lillyman and David Neuman. Oxford University Press, New York. November 1994. Collection of essays by architects and theorists, including Ann Bergren, Frank Gehry, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Robert A.M. Stern, Paul Zajfen and Michael Wilford.
"The Search for Common Ground." Introduction to Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture. Edited by William Lillyman, Marilyn Moriarty, and David Neuman. Oxford University Press, New York. November, 1994: 3-11.
Editor, Shakespeare's Hamlet in Twelve Plays for Theatre, ed. Robert Cohen. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994: 75-148. Compiled and annotated play text.
Editor, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in Eight Plays for Theatre, ed. Robert Cohen. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1988: 75-150. Compiled and annotated play text.
CREATIVE
“The Ass of Otranto,” story, Among Animals 3: The Lives of Humans and Animals in Contemporary Short Fiction. Ashland Creek Press. 2022. Reprinted from J-Journal: New Writings on Justice. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Issue 21. Spring, 2019.
"Bent Necessity,” short story, The New Haven Review. Vol 24. Spring, 2020.
"Road-Rage Jane in Torino,” essay on the Shroud of Turin. Raritan: A Quarterly Review, journal of Rutgers University. Volume XXXIX, Number 1. Summer 2019.
"Romancing the Bird,” essay, River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Vol. 19 No. 1, Fall 2017. The propagation and training of a peregrine-prairie falcon hybrid, falconry practices, past and present; Shakespeare’s Othello and Taming of the Shrew.
"Territorial Imperative in Planaria,” essay, Creative Nonfiction, Spring, 2015.
"Swerves,” Faulkner Society. Gold medal for the essay. Anthologized in Borderlands and Crossroads: Writing the Mother Land, edited by Jane Satterfield and Laurie Kruk. Demeter Press, 2016. Recorded for NPR January 21, 2015. Air date not yet determined.
