Rivka Galchen

Galchen was born in Toronto, Ontario. When she was an infant, her parents relocated to the United States, where she has lived ever since.[1] From 1981 to 1994 she lived in Norman, Oklahoma, where her father, Tzvi Gal-Chen, was a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma and her mother was a computer programmer at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.[2][3]

Galchen graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1998. She wrote her111-page senior thesis, "The Moon Just an Eyelash—fiction", under the supervision of A. J. Verdelle, with Joyce Carol Oates as a contributor.[4] In her sophomore year, Galchen applied to an early-admissions program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.[2] She received her M.D. from Mount Sinai in 2003.[5] After medical school, she earned a MFA in 2006 from Columbia University, where she was a Robert Bingham fellow.[5]

Galchen funded the beginning of her writing career after earning the MFA with the funds she received as a 2006 winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award for women writers.[5]

Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in May 2008.[6][7][8] The novel was a finalist for the Mercantile Library's 2008 John Sargent, Sr., First Novel Prize,[9] the Canadian Writers' Trust's 2008 Fiction Prize,[10] and the 2008 Governor General's Award.[11]

In October 2008, Galchen was teaching writing at Columbia University.[12] In 2010, Galchen was chosen by The New Yorker as one of its "20 Under 40".[13]

Galchen served as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fiction Fellow for the Spring 2011 term at the American Academy in Berlin.[14]

Galchen's short-story collection, American Innovations, was published in 2014.[15][16][17][18][19] It was longlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and received the Danuta Gleed Literary Award.

Galchen has written for several national magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, and The Believer. She was a contributing editor at Harper's.