Catherine Ryan Hyde

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (August 2007)

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling.
You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (January 2008)

Catherine Ryan Hyde (born 1955) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her novels have enjoyed bestseller status in both the US and UK and her short stories have won many awards and honors. Her book Pay It Forward was adapted into a movie and her novel Electric God is currently in development. She lives in Cambria, CA.

Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of the novel Funerals for Horses (Russian Hill Press 1997), a collection of short fiction, Earthquake Weather (Russian Hill Press 1998), the novels Pay it Forward (Simon & Schuster 2000), Electric God (Simon & Schuster 2000), and Walter’s Purple Heart (Simon & Schuster 2002). Pay It Forward the movie (Warner Brothers) was released in 2000, starring Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt. The book has been translated into 20 languages for publication in more than 30 countries, and chosen among the Best Books for Young Adults 2001 by the American Library Association. The paperback was released in October 2000 by Pocket Books and quickly became a national bestseller.

Her newer novels are Becoming Chloe (Knopf Spring 2006), Love in the Present Tense (Doubleday/Flying Dolphin Press Summer 2006), The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance (Knopf Spring 2007), Chasing Windmills (Doubleday/Flying Dolphin Press Spring 2008) and The Day I Killed James (Knopf Summer 2008) and Love in the Present Tense enjoyed bestseller status in the UK, where it broke the top ten, spent five weeks on the list, was reviewed on a major TV book club, and shortlisted for a Best Read of the Year award at the British Book Awards.

The April 20th, 2005 edition of Variety announced that Nicolas Cage has signed on to play Hayden Reese in the film adaptation of Electric God. More than 45 of her short stories have been published in The Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and many other journals. Her story Bloodlines was reprinted in the bestselling anthology Dog is my Co-Pilot (Crown, 2003).

Two of her stories have been honored in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She received second place in the 1997 Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Nearly a dozen of her stories have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Award and The Pushcart Prize. Three have been cited in Best American Short Stories anthologies.

She has served on the 1998 fiction fellowship panel of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and on the editorial staff of the Santa Barbara Review and Central Coast Magazine. She teaches workshops at the Santa Barbara, La Jolla and Central Coast Writers Conferences.

She is founder and president of the Pay It Forward Foundation. As a professional public speaker she has addressed the National Conference on Education, twice spoken at Cornell University, met with Americorps members at the White House and shared a dais with Bill Clinton.