Amy Boutell is a graduate of Barnard College and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. She has been awarded scholarships by the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and Summer Literary Seminars and a fellowship and residency by the Ragdale Foundation. Her short stories have been published or are forthcoming in Post Road, New Letters, Nimrod, and Other Voices. She has been a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, and the William Faulkner Short Story Competition. Her first novel, THE INVENTION OF VIOLET, is a finalist for the 2012 Pirate's Alley/Faulkner Society Novel-in-Progress Competition. She lives in Santa Barbara and works as instructor at UCSB's CLAS Writing Lab, where she has recently launched a new creative writing program.
