Amanda Boyden
Novelist

Babylon Rolling: A Novel
Pantheon, 2008

Pretty Little Dirty: A Novel
Vintage, 2006

Amanda Boyden was born in northern Minnesota and raised in Chicago and St. Louis. She's lived in many places since—from Los Angeles to Paris, Madrid to Berkeley. As a child Amanda threw herself from the tops of jungle gyms, attempting to fly. Eventually she split the gravity difference and became a nationally competitive gymnast. Visual arts, dance, and language drew her attention, too. She put in time at Washington University in St. Louis and the Kansas City Art Institute where she eventually graduated in photography/video. Between school stints, Amanda (having grown nine inches in nine months after quitting gymnastics some years earlier) worked as a professional model, gutter cleaner, elderly companion, breakfast waitress, editor, tutor, and freelance artist. She often chose the company of musicians, famous and not-so, as well as the conversation and camaraderie of visual artists.

Writing, however, seemed to be the one true common denominator of her life's passions, and after a firsthand experience with violent crime, Amanda decided to pursue writing seriously. She attended the University of New Orleans and graduated with an MFA in fiction. While there she met her Canadian husband, Joseph Boyden. They moved north to Ontario, in part because from the time she could remember—Vietnam War clips usurping her regular early morning cartoons—she'd sworn she'd live in the land of the truly free.

An odd meeting in a community garden between warehouses in Westside Toronto introduced Amanda to the circus arts. With her “remnant skills” from dance and gymnastics, Amanda moved up through the circus ranks. She worked first in Toronto and later Los Angeles as a contortionist and trapeze artist. Eventually Joseph and she decided that New Orleans was the closest to a communal home for them both, and they returned to the Deep South. Amanda formed her own trapeze troupe and performed for over three years in New Orleans in local and national productions. She includes hanging over the heads of the members of Galactic and 311, in front of thousands, among some of her better trapeze accomplishments.

As far as writing goes, Amanda's published fiction and non-fiction in a variety of venues, from the men's magazine Gallery to the literary Mid-American Review. While attending the University of New Orleans, Amanda received an AWP Intro Award for short fiction. Recently she was named a semifinalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition of 2003 for novel-in-progress.