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Paula Sharp

Biography

Paula Sharp

Paula Sharp was born in San Diego, California in 1957. The daughter of a nuclear physicist and an anthropologist, Sharp was raised by her mother in North Carolina, New Orleans and Ripon, Wisconsin. During Sharp’s childhood, her mother excavated pyramids and ruins in Mexico, and Sharp’s sister, Lesley, later became a prominent anthropologist and scholar of Malagasy history. In her early twenties, Sharp spent a year in the Brazilian Amazon, where she wrote her first novel, The Woman Who Was Not All There, which was published to critical acclaim in 1988, and won the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voice Award. Through her mid-thirties, Sharp lived in Jersey City and worked as a catholic school teacher, Spanish-English translator, secretary, and criminal investigator, and after graduating from Columbia University law school in 1985, she served as a public defender for the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan. She is also the author of the novels Crows over a Wheatfield and Lost in Jersey City, both New York Times Notable Books, and of the short story collection, The Imposter, which won the Wisconsin Library Association’s BANTA Award. She has received numerous literary honors, including an NEA fellowship and the New Jersey Distinguished Author Award. She now resides in New York State, and writes full time.

Paula Sharp

Books by Paula Sharp