Tara Ison's first novel, A Child out of Alcatraz (Faber & Faber, Inc.), was a Finalist for the 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Awards, "Best First Fiction."  Her second novel, The List (Scribner), was published in 2007. 

Her short fiction, essays, poetry and book reviews have appeared in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve.com, Black Clock, Publisher's Weekly, The Week magazine, The Mississippi Review, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and numerous anthologies.  She is also the co-writer of the movie Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead. 

 

She is the recipient of a 2008 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and a 2008 COLA Individual Artist Grant, as well as multiple Yaddo fellowships and Pushcart Prize nominations, a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for International Study, a Brandeis National Women's Committee Award, a Thurber House Fiction Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, the Simon Blattner Fellowship from Northwestern University, and a California Arts Council Artists' Fellowship Award. 

Ison received her MFA in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College.  She has taught creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Goddard College, Antioch University Los Angeles, and UC Riverside Palm Desert's MFA in Creative Writing program.  She is currently Assistant Professor of Fiction at Arizona State University.