Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver directed her first film, Old Enough, while she studied at Harvard University. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1984, when Silver was 23. Silver went on to direct three more feature films, Permanent Record (1988), with Keanu Reeves, Vital Signs (1990) with Diane Lane and Jimmy Smits, and He Said, She Said (1991), with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins. The latter was co-directed with her husband-to-be, Ken Kwapis.

After making her career in Hollywood, she switched her profession and entered graduate school to become a short story writer. Her first short story appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 2000[1] and subsequently several more stories have been published there.

Marisa Silver said "I felt very strongly that the stories I was telling weren’t the stories I wanted to tell, that what interested me — human behavior, the nuance of character, the life that exists in shadows and moments — was not, for the most part, the stuff of film. I knew I wanted to tell stories but I had a very profound realization that I was working in the wrong medium."[2]

For graduate school Marisa Silver attended a low residency program at Warren Wilson College, where she would later teach. Silver studied with Antonya Nelson, Robert Boswell, and Geoffrey Wolff. Silver says of her teachers "More than anything, they taught me how to read like a writer, how to understand how craft is used in others work and so begin to see how I might apply it in my own work. I think it’s pretty hard to teach a person how to write, but you can teach them how to read."[2]

Silver published the short-story collection, Babe in Paradise, in 2001.[3] That collection was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. A story from the collection was included in The Best American Short Stories 2000. In 2005, W. W. Norton & Company published her novel, No Direction Home.[4] Her novel The God of War was published in April 2008 by Simon & Schuster. Her second short-story collection, Alone with You, was published in 2010, and her third novel, Mary Coin, in 2013.

She was a visiting Senior Lecturer at the Otis College Graduate Writing Program in 2017 and also on the fiction faculty at Warren Wilson College.

She was awarded the 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for Fiction.[5]

Her most recent work, a novel titled Little Nothing, was released September 13, 2016.[6][7]

Silver was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, to Raphael Silver, a film director and producer, and Joan Micklin Silver, a director.

She and Kwapis have two sons.[8] They reside in Los Angeles.[9][2]

• Official website
• Marisa Silver at IMDb
• Marisa Silver's Filmography
• Review of The God of War, by Rodger Jacobs at PopMatters.com