Sena Jeter Naslund
New York Times bestselling author Sena Jeter Naslund's most recent novel is Adam & Eve; she has published seven previous books of fiction. The daughter of a physician father and a musician mother, she grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, with her two older brothers: Marvin D. Jeter, an archaeologist and author of Edward Palmer's Arkansaw Mounds; and John Sims Jeter, a retired engineer and author of the novel And the Angels Sang.The Jeter family also lived briefly in Loredo, West Virginia, and Jackson, Louisiana. Naslund attended public schools, Norwood Elementary and Phillips High School, in Birmingham and graduated from Birmingham Southern College where she received the B.B. Comer Medal in English. She earned a Master's Degree and a doctorate from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Kentucky Poet Laureate during 2005–2006, Naslund is currently Writer in Residence and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Louisville, Program Director of the Spalding University brief-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing, and editor of Spalding's Fleur-de-Lis Press and The Louisville Review, which she founded in 1976. She has also taught at the University of Montana, Indiana University (Bloomington), Vermont College, and the University of Montevallo, where she held the Paschal P. Vacca Chair of Liberal Arts with her husband John C. Morrison, a theoretical atomic physicist and coauthor of Many-Body Electron Theory. Sena Jeter Naslund was also Visiting Eminent Scholar at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Her six earlier books include the short story collections Ice Skating at the North Pole and The Disobedience of Water, and the novels The Animal Way to Love, Sherlock in Love, Ahab's Wife, and Four Spirits. With Elaine W. Hughes, Naslund is coauthor of a stage version of her civil rights novelFour Spirits, commissioned by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival Theatre and fully produced at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. Naslund is a recipient of the Harper Lee Award, the Hall-Waters Southern Prize, the Southeastern Library Association Award, and the Alabama Library Association Award, and she has held grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the University of Louisville.
Her work has been reprinted in Australia and in the United Kingdom, where Ahab's Wife was a finalist for the Orange Prize, and translated into German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Danish, Greek, and Spanish.
She lives in Louisville, Kentucky, and has a daughter, Flora Naslund, who is a student in the Bachelor of Fine Arts Program at the University of Louisville.