He was born in chicago in 1968. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he taught in a rural Catholic mission in Africa, received a law degree in Boston & practiced there as a juvenile public defender & then enrolled in the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop. He lectured in law & English in Prague until joining the English department at Miami University in Ohio, where he now lives.
Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama. She is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson's nonfiction books include When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, and The Death of Adam. Her novels Mother Country and Lila, were nominated for a National Book Award.