About Miriam Gershow

Miriam Gershow, the 2025 Writers & Wine featured author, is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Awards’ Ken Kesey Award for Fiction. Gershow has been awarded writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Wildacres. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and a Pencraft Award.

She received her MFA from the University of Oregon. She is the organizer of 100 Notable Small Press Books, a curated list of the year’s recommended titles across genres from independent publishers. Miriam teaches writing at the University of Oregon.

About the Book

Gershow’s latest work, Closer, published by Regal House, takes place in a fictional Oregon town. An altercation in a high school library creates unexpected and cascading consequences for a handful of students, faculty, and families across a community.

Here are what reviewers are saying about Closer:

“This novel is amazing! Post-millennial culture pays lip service to diversity, but Closer gives meaning to the term. In her powerful prose vignettes that read like poems, Gershow rounds up the usual suspects–race, gender, generation, religion, income, disability, sexuality–but gives voice and perspective to characters who insist on being human—often maddeningly so.”

—David Bradley, author

“Miriam Gershow has written a novel of tremendous insight, unflinching realism, and transcendent generosity. Closer will keep you up late turning pages while its vivid characters take up permanent residence in your head and heart. Bravo!”

—Antoine Wilson, author