Lucia Berlin

Lucia Berlin (1936-2004), whom critics have called "America's best-kept secret," dedicated her career exclusively to short stories. She did not gain significant recognition during her lifetime, maintaining a small but devoted audience, but her literary reputation soared eleven years after her death. Her short story collection "A Manual for Cleaning Women" became a bestseller, and the New York Times Book Review included it among the ten best books of 2015. Her stories are inspired by her childhood near mining camps where her father worked as an engineer, her glamorous teenage years in Santiago, Chile, her three failed marriages, her struggles with alcoholism, her wanderings in Mexico and California, the various odd jobs she took on to raise her four sons, and her experiences with loss and grief. In 1994, she began working as a visiting professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and was soon promoted to associate professor. Her declining health forced her to move to Southern California in 2001 to be closer to her sons. She passed away in 2004 at the age of sixty-eight in Marina del Rey.