Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore (born Marie Lorena Moore, January 13, 1957) is an American writer, critic, and essayist. She is best known for her short stories, some of which have won major awards. Since 1984, she has also taught creative writing. Marie Lorena Moore was born in Glens Falls, New York, nicknamed "Lorrie" by her parents. She attended St. Lawrence University. At 19, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest. The story "Raspberries" was published in January 1977. 

After graduating from St. Lawrence, she moved to Manhattan and worked as a paralegal for two years. In 1980, Moore enrolled in Cornell University's M.F.A. program, where Alison Lurie taught her. Upon graduation from Cornell, Moore was encouraged by a teacher to contact literary agent Melanie Jackson, who agreed to take her as a client. In 1983, Jackson sold Moore’s collection Self-Help, almost entirely stories from her master's thesis, to Knopf.

Her short story collections are Self-Help (1985), Like Life, the New York Times bestseller Birds of America, and Bark. She has contributed to The Paris Review. Her first story to appear in The New Yorker, "You're Ugly, Too," was later included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Another story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here," also published in The New Yorker, was reprinted in the 1998 edition of the annual collection The Best American Short Stories; the tale of a young child falling sick, the piece was loosely patterned on events in Moore's own life. 

The story was also included in the 2005 anthology Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules, edited by David Sedaris. Faber published Moore's Collected Stories in the UK in May 2008. It included all the stories in each of her previously published collections, excerpts from her novel Anagrams, and three previously uncollected stories first published in The New Yorker.

Moore's latest collection, Bark, was published in 2014. It became a finalist for The Story Prize and was shortlisted for Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Moore's novels are Anagrams (1986), Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (1994), and A Gate at the Stairs (2009). Anagrams, with their experimental form, received a rather cold critical response. 

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is the story of a woman vacationing with her husband who recalls an intense friendship from her adolescence. A Gate at the Stairs takes place just after the September 11 attack and is about a 20-year-old Midwestern woman's coming of age.

Moore has written a children's book entitled The Forgotten Helper, about an elf whom Santa Claus mistakenly leaves behind at the home of the worst child on his "good" list. The elf must help the child be good for the coming year so that Santa will return next Christmas.