Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen, winner of the 1994 Rae Award for the Short Story, was born in Nebraska in 1912. A Depression-era high school dropout, public libraries were her college. She wrote and published when young, but the necessity of raising and supporting four children through “everyday jobs” silenced her for twenty years. The recipient of six honorary degrees and many other awards, she has taught or been writer-in-residence at M.I.T., Amherst College, and Stanford University, among others. She lives in San Francisco.