Janet Burroway’s Long Arc: How a Life of Movement, Memory, and Migration Shaped One of America’s Most Influential Writers

Few American writers have lived a life as geographically varied—or as creatively expansive—as Janet Burroway. In a recent conversation, Burroway reflected on her evolving journey as a novelist, teacher, and critic, weaving together stories of early ambition, the influence of Chicago’s literary landscape, and the ways immigration, identity, and intergenerational trauma continue to shape her work.

Born in Tucson and raised in Phoenix, Burroway’s early path was anything but linear. She began college at the University of Arizona, charting possible futures in writing, acting, and even fashion design. That range of artistic curiosity led to her selection as one of Mademoiselle Magazine’s earliest “Guest Editors”—a moment she now sees as a catalyst for everything that followed. After transferring to Barnard College and later earning a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge University, she studied at the Yale School of Drama, embedding herself in the creative networks that would define her early career.

Her trajectory has always been an international one. In the late 1960s she taught at the University of Sussex in England, where she also designed costumes for the Gardner Center and the National Theatre of Belgium—an example of her lifelong tendency to move fluidly between disciplines. After returning to the U.S. in 1971, she taught at the University of Illinois, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Florida State University, where she became a Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor and later received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Humanities Council. More recently, she taught in Northwestern University’s MA/MFA Writing Program.

Across these decades, Burroway’s creative footprint has only widened. She has written more than twenty books—nine novels, three children’s books, poetry, essays, and a memoir—and her work has appeared everywhere from The Guardian to The Chicago Tribune to The New York Times. Her hallmark craft text, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, remains the most widely used fiction-writing guide in America, translated into Chinese and Vietnamese and relied upon by thousands of emerging writers every year.

Her plays have appeared on stages in Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and regional theaters across the country. Opening Nights, one of her early novels, became a PBS serial in 1998. Her children’s books were set to symphonic music by composer Philip Wharton and performed throughout the Midwest and in New York City—just one example of Burroway’s comfort with multi-genre collaboration.

Yet perhaps the most revealing moment of the conversation came when Burroway discussed the themes driving her newest novel, Simone in Pieces (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). Immigration, displacement, and generational trauma form the novel’s emotional backbone—subjects deeply intertwined with her own family’s history. Burroway spoke candidly about the vulnerability inherent in writing about trauma, particularly the loss of her son, Cpt. Timothy Eysselinck, who died in Africa in 2004. The reverberations of that loss, she acknowledged, continue to shape both her storytelling and her understanding of the ways pain can echo through generations.

Now living in Chicago with her husband, film critic and Utopian scholar Peter Ruppert, Burroway is preparing for the launch of Simone in Pieces. After a lifetime of teaching, traveling, and writing across continents, she remains attuned to the delicate interplay between memory and narrative—how stories can simultaneously expose and heal.

In a career spanning classrooms in Iowa and Florida, theatres in Belgium and Los Angeles, and conversations that stretch from London to Lake Geneva, Janet Burroway has remained committed to one thing above all: the belief that storytelling, in all its vulnerability, is an act of courage.

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