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 new novel, The List (Scribner), was published in February 2007. 

Her short fiction, essays and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve.com, Black Clock, The Mississippi Review, LA Weekly, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine and Book Review, 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 Yaddo fellowships, 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 Fiction and Screenwriting at Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Goddard College, the UCLA Writers' Program, and is currently Associate Professor/Core Faculty in Antioch University's MFA Program in Creative Writing.