Book Discussion Meeting, Saturday, January 5, 2019, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

This is what yarn-bombing looks like.

The Book That Matters Most by Ann Hood

Author Biography (from the fount of all knowledge)

Ann Hood was born in 1956 and grew up in Rhode Island. After she earned her BA in English from the University of Rhode Island, she worked for TWA as a flight attendant. She attended graduate school at New York University, studying American Literature. Hood began writing her first novel in 1983 while working as a flight attendant and attending graduate school. Her flight attendant career ended in 1986 when TWA went on strike and the flight attendants found themselves replaced. This gave her the opportunity to become a full-time writer.

On April 18, 2002, Hood's five-year-old daughter, Grace, died from a virulent form of strep. For two years Hood found herself unable to write or even read. She took solace in learning to knit and in knitting groups. She gradually made her way back to her craft, writing short essays about Grace and grief. To make sense of her own grief, in late 2004 Hood began to write her novel The Knitting Circle, about a woman whose five-year-old daughter dies from meningitis. The woman joins a knitting group of others also struggling to heal from loss. Hood’s best-selling memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief chronicles her own struggle after her daughter’s sudden death.

Hood is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at The New School in New York City. She also teaches at New York University and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

She is the recipient of the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award.

Hood lives in Providence, Rhode Island. She has two children, Annabelle and Sam, and is married to writer Michael Ruhlman.

Her body of work includes:

Novels

• Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, 1987.
• Waiting to Vanish, 1988.
• Three-Legged Horse, 1989.
• Something Blue, 1991.
• Places to Stay the Night, 1993.
• The Properties of Water, 1995.
• Ruby, 1998.
• The Knitting Circle, 2007.
• The Red Thread, 2010.
• The Obituary Writer, 2013.
• An Italian Wife, 2014.
• The Book That Matters Most, 2016.

Young-adult novels

• How I Saved My Father's Life (And Ruined Everything Else), 2008.
• She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah), 2018.

Short story collection

• An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories, 2004.

Nonfiction

• Creating Character Emotions (textbook), 1998.
• Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time (memoir). 2000.
• Comfort: A Journey Through Grief (memoir), 2008.
• Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting (essay, anthology), 2013.
• Knitting Pearls: Writers Writing About Knitting (essay, anthology), 2015.
• Morningstar (memoir), 2017.

In the video below, Ann Hood talks about The Book That Matters Most with a group at the Norwich, VT, library.

Scene from downtown Providence, Rhode Island