Patricia Hampl

Patricia Hampl (born March 12, 1946) is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.

Life

Hampl was born in St. Paul, Minnesota to Stanley and Mary Hampl. She attended the University of Minnesota where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1968. Hampl earned her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa in 1970.

Hampl worked as an editor of the Minnesota Monthly from 1973 to 1975. She worked as freelance writer and editor from 1975 to 1979. Between 1979 and 1996, Hampl occupied the positions of visiting assistant professor, associate professor, and professor of English at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. Hampl has also served as an educator at other institutions such as Ball State University and West Virginia University. She also served as a faculty member for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference 1995 and 1996. She is a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. Since 2005, she has been a member of the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program, hosted by Prague's Charles University and Western Michigan University. In the Spring semester 2015, Hampl was an Adjunct Faculty in the Writing program at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Writing career

Hampl is best known for her emotionally charged and introspective works in the memoir genre. Her first memoir, A Romantic Education, dealt with Hampl’s Czech heritage and won Hampl the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1981. Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life, another of Hampl’s memoirs, dealt with her Roman Catholic upbringing. Her short story “The Bill Collector’s Vacation,” was awarded a 1999 Pushcart Prize.

More recently, Hampl has won recognition for her memoir The Florist’s Daughter which deals with her feelings at the time of her mother’s death. The book was met with critical acclaim when it was published in 2007. The New York Times Book Review stated that “Hampl’s honest examination of her own life makes The Florist’s Daughter a wonder of a memoir.” It won the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir & Creative Nonfiction.

Hampl is also the author of several poems and other works (See Selected Bibliography Below).

Awards

(Note: This is a list of selected awards. For a complete list of awards earned by Patricia Hampl, see the External Links section below)

• Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1976)
• National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1976)
• Bush Foundation Fellowship (1979)
• Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship (1981)
• Fulbright Fellowship (1995)
• McKnight Distinguished University Professorship (1996)
• Pushcart Prize (1999)
• Distinguished Achievement Award, Western Literature Association (2001)

Selected bibliography

• Woman Before an Aquarium (1978)
• A Romantic Education (1981)
• Resort and Other Poems (1983)
• (With Steven Sorman) Spillville (1987)
• Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life (1992)
• Memory and Imagination (1999)
• Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime (2006)
• The Florist's Daughter: A Memoir (2007)

External links

Patricia Hampl at the Biography Resource Center

• Periodicals by Patricia Hampl at the Biography Reference Bank
• Review of The Florist's Daughter at the New York Times Book Review
• Audio Interview with Patricia Hampl at the Barnes & Noble Studio
• The Official Patricia Hampl Website
• "Montaigne's Lute" by Patricia Hampl in "Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art." (26.1)
• Interview with Patricia Hampl on University of Minnesota English Department Website