Biography

Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada in 1955. Without finishing high school, she went to New York to become an artist, and ended up working at a "modeling" agency posing nude for lowlife shutterbugs. She went to study art at the California Institute of Arts, under John Baldessari

John Baldessari

John Anthony Baldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California...

. She earned her BFA from CalArts in 1975. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine

The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

 in 1981. She's the author of The Tattoo Artist. She's a professor of English at the University of Florida

University of Florida

The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...

 in Gainesville, Florida

Gainesville, Florida

Gainesville is the largest city in, and the county seat of, Alachua County, Florida, United States as well as the principal city of the Gainesville, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area . The preliminary 2010 Census population count for Gainesville is 124,354. Gainesville is home to the sixth...

. Her new novel Heroic Measure was released in the spring of 2009, Pantheon Books-Knopf-Doubleday Publisher. This book was one of titles chosen by Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011...

's Book Club for 2009 summer time reading. This book was also one of the top five finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for 2010.

She is married to artist, Arnold Mesches

Arnold Mesches

-Bio:Arnold Mesches, born in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, He was raised in Buffalo, New York. He moved in Los Angeles in 1943 on a scholarship at the Art Center School. In 1945 the FBI opened a file on him targeting as a subversive communist. Many of his collected paintings represented images of...

.

Grants and literary awards

• Two New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship
• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
• Guggenheim Foundation grant.
• The Janet Hiedinger Kafka Prize
• NEA Japan Fellowship Prize.

Novels by Ciment

• Heroic Measures: Released on June 30, 2009 Pantheon Books-Knopf-Doubleday Press
• Half a Life-Non-fiction, Crown Publishing,1996
• Teeth of the Dog, Random House, 1999
• Tattoo Artist, Vintage Books, 2006
• The Law of Falling Bodies, 1993
• Small Claims-Short Stories, Grove/Atlanta Press1 986