Biography
A. Manette Ansay was born in Michigan in 1964. When she was five, she and her family moved to Port Washington, Wisconsin. There she began taking piano lessons and continued throughout high school. She attended the Peabody Conservatory of Music as a piano performance student, but had to withdraw because of increasing health problems. Searching for a career that she could perform with little physical strength, in 1988 she made a New Year's resolution to begin writing two hours a day for three days a week. She graduated from Cornell in 1991 and then went on to teach at several colleges throughout the U.S. Two of her professional stops were in Tennessee. From 1993-1997 Ansay was an assistant professor in Nashville at Vanderbilt University, and in the fall of 1998, she taught as a visiting writer at the University of the South in Sewanee.
Ansay has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Friends of American Writers Prize, and two Great Lakes Book Awards. Her fifth novel, Midnight Champagne (1999), was a finalist for a the National Book Critics Circle Award. Also in 1999, Oprah Winfrey chose Vinegar Hill (1994) as her November 1999 Book Club Selection.
She has recently finished her latest work, Limbo (2001), and is writing again in New York where she now lives with her husband of eleven years.
Bibliography
Fiction
Non-Fiction
Short Fiction
Sources and Links