Cara Hoffman

Cara Hoffman is a New York City-based writer, novelist, and professor. She was born in rural New York State and has one son.^[1][2] Her work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review. According to Marie Claire, as of March 2015 she currently lives in Manhattan with artist Marc Lepson.

Life

Early years

Hoffman grew up in upstate New York. She has two brothers. As a child and adolescent she studied music and ballet. She was trained as a boxer in Ithaca, NY.^[3] Hoffman dropped out of high school and lived in Europe in her late teens, settling in Athens, Greece, where she worked in a hotel.^[4]

Education

Hoffman believes her nontraditional education allowed her to become a reporter who focused on educating the community, not selling papers. In the 2000s, she began exploring the idea of writing fiction. While lecturing at Goddard College in 2006, for the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition Conference, she decided to pursue an MFA despite her lack of a high school or undergraduate diploma.^[1]

Career

After returning to the United States, she gave birth to her son, worked delivering papers and worked her way up as an investigative reporter. Hoffman worked at several newspapers in New York State.^[2] She has called her career path a very "1940s trajectory."^[1]

She became interested in small press, collective, and anti-authoritarian publishing in the early 2000s. In 2004 she published an unedited, print-on-demand roman à clef which told of her stay in Athens. She published a collection of short stories with the education and learning collective Factory School.^[2]

Hoffman worked for a number of publications including Fifth Estate, the longest running anti-authoritarian magazine in North America. She taught writing at Loaves and Fishes, a soup kitchen in Ithaca, New York. She later taught English at Lehman Alternative Community School and worked as an adjunct professor at Tompkins Cortland Community College.

A prominent feminist, Hoffman has written essays that have been featured on NPR, Truthout, and Women’s Media Center's Woman Under Siege.^[5][6][7] As a lecturer, she has spoken about ending global sexualized violence at Columbia University and antisocial masculinity at Oxford University’s Global Scholar’s Symposium.^[8] She was visiting writer at St. John’s University Academic Lecture Series - A Conversation with Cara Hoffman, Author of "So Much Pretty" - Queens Campus, and Goddard College.^[1][9]

She has won a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and currently teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College and sings classical music with the St. George Choral Society, Manhattan's oldest choir.^[1]

Simon & Schuster published her first major novel, So Much Pretty, on March 15, 2011. Her second novel, Be Safe I Love You, was published on April 3, 2014.

So Much Pretty

So Much Pretty was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews. Publisher's Weekly gave it a Starred Review, and Booklist compared it to The Lovely Bones and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.^[10] The LA Times found the build-up of suspense worthwhile and said, "To say more about Hoffman's constantly surprising story is to reveal too much, but the payoff is more than worth the slow-building suspense.^[10][11]

The New York Times wrote:

"For all the passion in this intense narrative, Hoffman writes with a restraint that makes poetry of pain. She also shows a mastery of her craft by developing the story over 17 years and narrating it from multiple perspectives. While each has a different take on the horrific events that no one saw coming, the people who live in this insular place remain willfully blind to their own contributions to the deeper causes that made this tragedy almost inevitable".^[12]

The New York Times Book Review later called the novel the best suspense novel of 2011.^[12]

Be Safe I Love You

Hoffman's second novel was published in April 2014, receiving strong critical praise and a nomination for the 2015 Folio Prize.^[13] George Stephanopoulos interviewed Hoffman about the book for ABC News on August 29, 2014.^[14] Library Journal gave it a starred review and called it, "a contemporary version of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried with a female protagonist."^[15]

The New York Times Book Review wrote:

“A finely tuned piece of fiction . . . Be Safe I Love You is a painful exploration of the devastation wrought by combat even when the person returns from war without a scratch. The story—written with such lucid detail it's hard to believe the main character is an invention—suggests the damage starts long before the soldier reports for duty. . . . In crystalline language that conveys both the desolation of the Iraqi desert and the north country of New York State . . . this book is a reminder that art and love are all that can keep us from despair.”^[16]

Hoffman wrote a related op-ed piece on female veterans for the New York Times entitled The Things She Carried which was published on March 31, 2014,^[17] and another on the human cost of war for SALON in July 2014.^[18]

Be Safe I Love You was selected as a recipient of the 2015 Sundance Institute Global Filmmaking Award.^[19] The project will be directed by Haifaa al-Mansour.

References

External links

• Official Website
• "The Inner Sanctum", InnerSanctum.simonandschuster.biz, Simon and Schuster, 2011.
• Cara Hoffman at Goddard College