Herman received a B.A./B.S. from
Brooklyn College and an M.F.A. from the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, after which she was a James Michener Fellow. She taught from 1988 until 2022 at the
Ohio State University, where she was a founder of both the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and an interdisciplinary graduate program in the arts. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and many grants from the Ohio Arts Council and Greater Columbus Arts Council in addition to her James Michener Fellowship. In addition to her novels, she has published a collection of
short fiction,
A New and Glorious Life. "Auslander," which appears in the collection was also included in
American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories by
Gerald Shapiro and other anthologies. She has also published three earlier essay collections,
The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and
Like A Song. She writes a weekly advice columnist for
Slate. Roberta Maierhofer viewed Herman's novel
Missing as a literary gerontology example of the process of redefining one's self in advancing age. == Bibliography ==