Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver (born April 23, 1960) is an American author, screenwriter and film director.

Film work

Silver enrolled at

Following her experience working on documentary films, Silver wrote a screenplay for her first feature-length fiction film, Old Enough, which was produced by her sister, Dina Silver. The film won the Grand Jury Prize Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival in 1984, when she was 23.

She went on to direct three more feature films: Permanent Record (1988), with Keanu Reeves; Vital Signs (1990) with Diane Lane and Jimmy Smits; and He Said, She Said (1991), with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins. The latter was co-directed with her husband-to-be, Ken Kwapis.

Literary work

After making her career in Hollywood, she switched her profession and entered graduate school to become a short story writer. Explaining her change in media, she said "I felt very strongly that the stories I was telling weren't the stories I wanted to tell, that what interested me—human behavior, the nuance of character, the life that exists in shadows and moments—was not, for the most part, the stuff of film. I knew I wanted to tell stories but I had a very profound realization that I was working in the wrong medium."^[1]

Her first short story appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 2000^[2] and subsequently several more stories have been published there.

For graduate school, Silver attended a low-residency program at Warren Wilson College, where she would later teach. She studied with Antonya Nelson, Robert Boswell, and Geoffrey Wolff. Silver said of her teachers, "More than anything, they taught me how to read like a writer, how to understand how craft is used in others work and so begin to see how I might apply it in my own work. I think it’s pretty hard to teach a person how to write, but you can teach them how to read."^[1]

Silver published the short-story collection, Babe in Paradise, in 2001.^[3] That collection was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. A story from the collection was included in The Best American Short Stories 2001.^[4] In 2005, W. W. Norton & Company published Silver's novel, No Direction Home.^[5] Her novel The God of War was published in April 2008 by Simon & Schuster. Her second short-story collection, Alone with You, was published in 2010, and her third novel, Mary Coin, in 2013. The latter is a meditation on Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph, Migrant Mother (1936).

Her novel, Little Nothing, was released September 13, 2016.^[6][7]

She was a visiting Senior Lecturer at the

She and Kwapis have two sons.[12] They reside in Los Angeles.^[13][1]

References