Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of the novel MAN ALIVE! as well as THE BOWL IS ALREADY BROKEN and THE FREQUENCY OF SOULS, all published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Her work has won the American Academy's Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She is a five-time winner of a D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellowship.

Born in 1960 in Syracuse, New York, Mary Kay grew up in Oklahoma City. She has a degree in English and mathematics from Rice University and in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University. Mary Kay has taught writing at American University, Johns Hopkins University, and George Mason University. She has written and edited museum exhibitions, books, and magazines, especially for the Smithsonian Institution, including nine years as senior editor at the Freer and Sackler Galleries.

Mary Kay serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, where she curates the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series. She is cofounder of D.C. Women Writers.

She and her husband, Gary Zizka, have two children, Theo and Eliza, both formidable writers in their own right. Also, should it be necessary, she can play a few chords on the ukulele.

Books by Mary Kay Zuravleff

Man Alive!

by Mary Kay Zuravleff - Fiction

All it takes is a quarter to change pediatric psychiatrist Dr. Owen Lerner’s life. When the coin he’s feeding into a parking meter is struck by lightning, Lerner survives, except that now all he wants to do is barbecue. What will happen to his patients, who rely on him to make sense of their world? More important, what will happen to his family?