Pulitzer Prize winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and countless other personal narratives, a genre Dillard has made her own.

Annie Dillard was born in Pittsburgh to Frank and Pam Doak and writes professionally under the name of her first husband. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Hollins College in Roanoke , Virginia . After several years at Western Washington University , Dillard moved to Middletown , Connecticut , where she has been a professor and writer-in-residence at Wesleyan University since 1979. She lives where she lives, Dillard wrote, in a 1984 essay in Esquire magazine, “because . . . it was time to come back East--back to that hardwood forest where the multiple trees and soft plants have their distinctive seasons and their places in sun and shade.” Though she may have come to New England for the forest, she prefers to live on a residential street near the campus with her husband, Robert Richardson, a biographer and professor, and her daughter, Rosie.

In 1974 Dillard published her first two works--a small book of poems, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Pilgrim was an overnight success, meeting with immediate critical and popular acclaim. Praised for its graceful prose, its astute observations of the natural world, and the meditative reflections of its author, Pilgrim is often compared to Henry Thoreau's Walden. Since receiving the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1975, Dillard has proved a prolific writer of essays, poetry, memoirs, literary criticism, and fiction, who is respected for her elegant narrative style in books such as Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1982) and An American Childhood (1987). In 1992, Dillard published her first novel, The Living (1992), a sprawling historical epic set in the Pacific Northwest .

In addition to writing and contributing to over a dozen books, Dillard herself is the subject of many studies, including a full-length book in the Twayne US Authors Series. The Annie Dillard Reader, a collection of her best known narratives, uncollected essays, and several new pieces was published by Harper in 1994. Dillard's many honors include a New York Press Club Award, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Connecticut Governor's Arts Award (1993), a best foreign book citation (1990) in France , and honorary doctorates from Boston College , Connecticut College, and the University of Hartford .