Sigrid Nunez is the author of five novels: “A Feather on the Breath of God,” “Naked Sleeper,” “Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury,” “For Rouenna” and “The Last of Her Kind.”

Her sixth novel, “Salvation City,” will be published by Riverhead in September 2010.

The Washington Post raved that “‘For Rouenna’ is about everything: war and remembrance, how we invent our ‘selves’ and why; why we kill ourselves — or live. I was dazzled by this book.”

And the New York Times said that “’The Last of Her Kind’ is full of incident and high drama … it is, above all, about the way women communicate and interpret their experience, bearing down on every nuance, irony, anguished interchange and heartbreaking loss…. [A]n unflinching examination of justice, race and political idealism that brings to mind Philip Roth’s ‘American Pastoral’ and the tenacious intelligence of Nadine Gordimer.”

Her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including two Pushcart Prize volumes and four anthologies of Asian-American literature.

“A Feather on the Breath of God” was a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Award. It also received the Association for Asian American Studies Award for best novel of the year.

“Mitz,” a mock biography of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s pet monkey, won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has also been the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a residency from the Lannan Foundation. She was the 2000-2001 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature at the American Academy in Rome. In 2003, she was elected as a Literature Fellow to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In spring 2005, she was the Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Nunez has taught at Amherst College, Smith College, Columbia University and the New School, and has been a visiting writer at Washington University, Baruch College and the University of California, Irvine. She has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Rope Walk Writer’s Retreat.

She lives in New York. Visit her online at www.sigridnunez.com.