Michael Cunningham is a renowned American novelist and screenwriter, celebrated for his 1998 novel The Hours, which garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. He currently holds the position of senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Cunningham spent his formative years in Pasadena, California. He pursued his undergraduate degree in English literature at Stanford University, where he excelled academically. Later, at the University of Iowa, he secured a Michener Fellowship and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the esteemed Iowa Writers' Workshop. During his time at Iowa, his short stories were published in the Atlantic Monthly and the Paris Review, with one of his stories, "White Angel", being adapted into a chapter in his novel A Home at the End of the World, which was subsequently included in "The Best American Short Stories, 1989" published by Houghton Mifflin.
Throughout his illustrious career, Cunningham has received numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988. In 1995, he was awarded a Whiting Award. He has taught at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the creative writing M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College, before taking up his current role as senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.
The Hours cemented Cunningham's status as a major force in American literature, and his 2010 novel, By Nightfall, received widespread critical acclaim. In addition to his literary pursuits, Cunningham has edited a collection of poetry and prose by Walt Whitman, Laws for Creations, and co-written a screenplay with Susan Minot, adapted from her novel Evening. He served as a producer for the film Evening (2007),starring Glenn Close, Toni Collette, and Meryl Streep. In November 2010, Cunningham judged one of NPR's "Three Minute Fiction" contests.
In April 2018, it was announced that Cunningham would be serving as consulting producer for the revival of the Tales of the City (2019) miniseries, based on Armistead Maupin's book series of the same name. The miniseries premiered on June 7, 2019.
