Home
Prize-winning Author, Margot Singer
Margot is the prize-winning author of an essay collection, Secret Agent Man (Barrow Street, 2025), a novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House, 2017), and a collection of short stories, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007). She is also the co-editor, with Nicole Walker, of Bending Genre (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 2nd ed. 2023), a collection of critical essays on creative nonfiction.
Singer’s short stories and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, AGNI, The Sun, the Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. Literary prizes include the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction, the Nancy Dasher Book Award, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and the Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay. Several of her essays have been named “Notable” in the Best American Essays series. Her novel was short-listed (final 5) for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and her short story collection received an Honorable Mention from the judges of the PEN/Hemingway Award. She has also been awarded an Ohio Art Council Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, as well as artist’s residencies at Ucross, Radgale, and Yaddo.
Professor of English, the Director of Creative Writing, and the Director of Strategy for the Arts, Margot has taught at Denison University for 20 years. From 2013-19, she served as the Director of the Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement, Denison’s fellowships office. She has been recognized with the Fordham Endowed Chair of Creative Writing, the Bonar Family Mentorship and Teaching Award, the Dominick Consolo Endowed Professorship, and the Bosler Endowed Faculty Fellowship.
Margot holds a Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Utah; an M.Phil. in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar; and an A.B. in History and Literature, magna cum laude, from Harvard University. Before turning to writing full time, she spent ten years with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she was a principal in the New York Office.