About
Amanda Barusch

Amanda has never had much patience for tidy categories.

Growing up near the U.S.-Mexico border, she learned early that the world was larger, stranger, and more interconnected than it first appeared. Books became a way of crossing boundaries and entering other lives, landscapes, and ways of seeing. That fascination has stayed with her.

Today, Amanda writes fiction, essays, and scholarship about aging, memory, family, identity, the stories people tell, and the lessons they glean from all that life throws at them. Whether working as a storyteller or a researcher, she is drawn to the moments when certainty gives way to ambiguity, and people find themselves transformed.

Before becoming a professor and author, Amanda worked as a janitor, matchmaker, exotic dancer, and editor. Those experiences reinforced something she already suspected: people are rarely just one thing. A life can be practical and mysterious, wounded and resilient, ordinary and surprising, all at once.

Amanda is the author of eight nonfiction books, and her essays, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in publications in the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. She is also the founder of Yawning Fox Press, an independent literary publisher.

A Kiwi-American writer, Amanda divides her time between New Zealand and the American West. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Fiction and Book Arts from the University of Utah. She is Emeritus Professor at both the University of Utah and the University of Otago.

Scholarship taught her to ask better questions. Literature gave her room to live with the answers. Together, they shape a body of work concerned with how people age, love, endure, remember, and reinvent themselves across a lifetime.