Nicole Stansbury is an American novelist, short story and essay writer. Her novel Places to Look for a Mother (2002) and her collection of short stories The Husband's Dilemma (2004) were published by Carroll & Graf, and her shorter works have appeared in The Threpenny Review

The Threepenny Review

The Threepenny Review is an American literary magazine founded in 1980. It is published in Berkeley, California by founding editor Wendy Lesser. Maintaining a quarterly schedule , it offers fiction, memoirs, poetry, essays and criticism to a readership of 10,000...

, PRISM international

PRISM international

PRISM international is a magazine published quarterly in Vancouver, British Columbia. Established in 1959, it is Western Canada's senior literary magazine...

, and Yellow Silk

Yellow Silk

Yellow Silk: Journal of Erotic Arts was a magazine founded by writer and editor Lily Pond and published quarterly from 1981 to 1996.-Anthologies:Works published in this magazine were anthologized in:...

.

She earned a BA (1986) in English and an MFA (1991) in Creative Writing from the University of Utah. Stansbury has been honored numerous times for her work including several grants from the Utah Arts Council

Utah Arts Council

The Utah Division of Arts & Museums is an agency of the state government of Utah, responsible for the promotion of the arts and Utah museums. It is a division of the Utah Department of Community and Culture...

. Places to Look for a Mother won Stansbury the Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble, Inc. is the largest book retailer in the United States, operating mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores headquartered at 122 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District in Manhattan in New York City. Barnes & Noble also operated the chain of small B. Dalton...

 "Discover New Writers" award, and The Husband's Dilemma won the 2005 Utah Book Award.

Stansbury's works concern a range of issues including modern life in the western United States, particularly life in Utah

Utah

Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...

. She has been praised for her insightful and compelling depiction of the life of non-Mormons in Mormon

Mormon

The term Mormon most commonly denotes an adherent, practitioner, follower, or constituent of Mormonism, which is the largest branch of the Latter Day Saint movement in restorationist Christianity...

-dominated Utah, and more generally for her keen eye for telling detail. The setting for most of her work is domestic: her first novel concerns a mother-daughter relationship in the midst of a disintegrating family. Her stories include tales of husbands, wives and children navigating the trauma of life in contemporary America, and is sometimes humorous and at other times harrowing.

External links

• Author's website
• Static - MP3 Audio, read by the author
• An Authentic Take on Flaky Parenting - review of Places to Look for a Mother
• Leap - online story
• Places to Look for a Mother - Entire text online at Google Book Search
  Google Book Search
  Google Books is a service from Google that searches the full text of books that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition, and stored in its digital database. The service was formerly known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October...