Bios

Throughline

(14 words)

Amanda Barusch writes fiction, essays, and scholarship about aging, memory, identity, family, and the ways people reinvent themselves across a lifetime.

Short Bio

(65 words)

Amanda Barusch writes fiction, essays, and scholarship about aging, memory, identity, family, and the stories people tell to make sense of their lives. A Kiwi-American writer and emeritus professor, she is the author of eight nonfiction books, including Aging Angry: Making Peace with Rage. Her essays, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in publications in the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Medium Bio

(121 words)

Amanda Barusch writes fiction, essays, and scholarship about aging, memory, family, identity, and transformation. Her work explores the ways people make meaning from their lives, often at moments of change, loss, reinvention, and discovery.

A Kiwi-American writer, Amanda divides her time between New Zealand and the American West. She is the author of eight nonfiction books, including Aging Angry: Making Peace with Rage, 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 press.

Whether writing creatively or academically, she is drawn to questions that resist easy answers and to stories that reveal the complexity of being human.

Long Bio

(248 words)

Amanda Barusch has worked as a janitor, matchmaker, exotic dancer, editor, professor, and writer. Along the way, she developed a fascination with the stories people tell, the stories they inherit, and the stories that help them survive.

Today, Amanda writes fiction, essays, and scholarship about aging, memory, family, identity, and transformation. Her work often inhabits the space between literary and scholarly inquiry, exploring the questions that arise as people navigate change, loss, belonging, resilience, and reinvention.

Amanda is the author of eight nonfiction books, including Aging Angry: Making Peace with Rage, Love Stories of Later Life, and Older Women in Poverty. Her essays, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in literary publications in the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. She is also the founder of Yawning Fox Press, an independent literary press.

A Kiwi-American writer, Amanda divides her time between New Zealand and the American West, where she spends as much time as possible on dirt paths and back roads. 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.

Amanda is particularly interested in the ways ordinary lives reveal extraordinary truths about what it means to be human. She has an abiding affection for ambiguity, a healthy suspicion of boundaries, and a lifelong curiosity about how people make meaning from their lives.

Professional Introduction

(115 words)

Amanda Barusch is a Kiwi-American writer, scholar, and emeritus professor whose work explores aging, anger, care, memory, identity, and the stories people tell to make sense of their lives. She is the author of eight nonfiction books, including Aging Angry: Making Peace with Rage, Love Stories of Later Life, and Older Women in Poverty. Her essays, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in publications in the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, and she is the founder of Yawning Fox Press, an independent literary press.

Amanda’s work often moves between literary and scholarly inquiry, asking how people navigate change, loss, belonging, resilience, and reinvention across a lifetime. Please welcome Amanda Barusch.