Catherine Ryan Hyde (born 1955) is an American novelist and short story writer. Her novels have enjoyed bestseller status in both the U.S. and U.K., 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.
Contents |
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,[1] La Jolla, and Central Coast Writers Conferences.
She is founder and president of the Pay It Forward Foundation.[2] As a professional public speaker she has addressed the National Conference on Education, twice spoken at Cornell University,[3] met with Americorps members at the White House, and shared a dais with Bill Clinton.[4]
She lives in Cambria, California.[5] She identifies as a lesbian.[6]
Her work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, Ploughshares,[7] and Glimmer Train.
The movie Pay It Forward (Warner Brothers) was released in 2000, and starred Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment. The book has been translated into twenty languages for publication in more than thirty countries, and was chosen among the Best Books for Young Adults in 2001 by the American Library Association. The paperback was released in 1999 by Pocket Books and quickly became a national bestseller.
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.
Two of her stories have been honored in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She received second place in the 1998 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.
She is the author of a young adult novel that features a transgender character, who may have been based on Hyde's experience growing up as the sibling of transgender writer and activist Leslie Feinberg. Feinberg disowned Hyde several decades ago along with other relatives due to the hostility and bigotry they felt was displayed by them, has criticized Hyde for her portrayal of transgender youth and has asked repeatedly not to be associated with Hyde or the publicity for the novel in part due to these misleading associations causing great distress to Leslie and Leslie's chosen family at a time of severe illness.[8]