Catherine Ryan Hyde

Critically acclaimed novelist and award-winning short story writer Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of more than forty published stories, the novels Pay It Forward and Funerals for Horses, and the story collection Earthquake Weather. Pay It Forward, released in February, 2000 by Simon & Schuster, is a Warner Brothers feature film starring Academy Award winners Kevin Spacey,  Helen Hunt, and Academy Award nominee Haley Joel Osment. Also from Simon & Schuster, and already optioned for film are her novels Electric God (December, 2000) and Walter's Purple Heart (Winter, 2002). Pay It Forward has been translated into 10 languages for publication in 14 countries, while the mass market paperback was released by Pocket Books in October, 2000.

Her stories have been published in The Illinois Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, South Dakota Review, The Amherst Review, Ploughshares, The Crescent Review, The Laurel Review, Literal Latte, High Plains Literary Review, Bellingham Review, Red Cedar Review, The Antioch Review, Puerto del Sol, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals, and in the anthologies Santa Barbara Stories (John Daniel & Co., 1998), and California Shorts (Heyday Books, 1999). Two of her stories have been honored in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest: Love is Always Running Away in 1994 and Dante in 1996. Her story Red Texas Sky was nominated for Best American Short Stories, the O'Henry Award, and a Pushcart Prize; her stories Wednesday Man, The Last Younger Man, Five Singing Gardeners and One Dead Stranger, and four stories from Earthquake Weather have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She placed second in the 1997 Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction for Breakage, an excerpt from her novel Turtle Park. Castration Humor was cited as one of the "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 1998" in Best American Short Stories 1999. She has served on the administrative staff of the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, the fiction fellowship panel of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and on the editorial staff of the Santa Barbara Review. Each fall she teaches fiction workshops at the Cuesta College Writers' Conference.

Catherine Ryan Hyde currently lives in Cambria, California, and writes full-time.