Rosellen has published ten books – novels, short stories, poetry, essays – and has lived in almost as many places – New York, Boston, San Francisco, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Texas and, currently, Chicago. Half a dozen of her stories have appeared in the annual prize collections (O. Henry, Best American, and Pushcart) and one was chosen by John Updike for his Best American Stories of the Century anthology. One of her novels, Before and After, was translated into 23 languages and became a movie starring Meryl Streep and Liam Neeson.

She has been on the faculty of the MFA in Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1997 and for many summers led the Spoleto Writers’ Workshop in Umbria, Italy. From 1965-67 she taught at Tougaloo College in Mississippi; in 1976 served on the faculty of the first low-residency writing program, at Goddard College in Vermont; taught at Boston University and the University of Michigan and, from 1982-95, at the University of Houston. Brown’s awards have included two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Council on the Arts award for Some Deaths in the Delta and other poems, the Great Lakes College Association prize for the best first novel for The Autobiography of My Mother, Ingram-Merrill and Howard Foundation grants, the Janet Kafka best novel award for Civil Wars. She was named a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year in 1984 and in 1987 received a literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

One of Rosellen’s first experiences with the Guild was as a participant on a panel about writing as a socially committed artist. She also took part in two lively and well-attended public conversations with visitors from the University of Iowa International Writers’ Workshop who, through fascinating accounts of their lives as writers in diverse and sometimes difficult circumstances, put our own conditions in perspective.