Pneuman, Angela

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Pneuman, Angela

PERSONAL:

Education: Studied at the State University of New York at Albany and Indiana University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Albany, NY.

CAREER:

Writer. Former copywriter for the wine industry in Napa Valley, CA; Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, former Stegner Fellow and Marsh McCall Lecturer in fiction.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Lois Davidson Ellis Literary Award, Indiana University, for fiction; master's fellowship, Indiana Arts Council.

WRITINGS:

Home Remedies, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Glimmer Train, and Believer magazine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Angela Pneuman, a writer who has studied at Indiana University, also worked as a copywriter for the wine industry in Napa Valley, California. She was both a Stegner Fellow and a Marsh McCall Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University before moving across the country to pursue her doctoral studies in Albany, New York. Some of her work appeared in Best American Short Stories 2004.

Home Remedies, published in 2007, is a collection of stand-alone short fiction connected loosely by the thread of conservative Christian faith. The stories primarily deal with women's relations with each other or that of children with their parents and their faith. Reviews of Home Remedies were mostly positive. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews summarized the book as "eight well-crafted, tough-minded stories of fractured lives that occasionally slip into caricature and repetition." A reviewer in Publishers Weekly mentioned that Pneuman's readers might "feel a cold disconnect with her characters" but noted that the author's "knowledge of the lingo of conservative Christianity lends authenticity to her narratives." Malena Watrous, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, labeled the book as "darkly hilarious," adding that the "tough young girls" throughout the stories "are not the kind of girls you'd expect to meet in the evangelical Christian communities that Pneuman brings to life."