Bio: Cai Emmons

Cai Emmons's first novel His Mother's Son, was published by Harcourt in 2003.  It has been translated into French and German, has been a Booksense selection, as well as a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection.  It won the 2003 Ken Kesey Award for the Novel (an Oregon Book Award) and was released in paperback in 2004.  Cai's second novel, The Stylist, was published by HarperCollins in 2007.  Booklist said of the book: "With family relations twisted as a French braid and language as vivid as a platinum dye job, Emmons' potent novel features magnetic characters and complex and compelling secrets."  Cai's third novel—close to completion at the time of this writing—is tentatively titled The Seventh Tenet.  A fourth novel, Continuous Travelers, is underway.  Cai's essays and stories and reviews have appeared in such publications as:  Arts and Letters, Narrative Magazine, The New York Post, Portland Monthly, and The Oregon Quarterly. 

Cai was born and raised in the Boston area.  After studying playwriting with Adrienne Kennedy at Yale, Cai began her writing career as a dramatist.  She was twice a playwright in residence at the Albee Foundation's "Barn" and two of her plays, Mergatroid and When Petulia Comes, were produced at New York theaters (The American Place Theater, Playwrights' Horizons, and Theatre Genesis).  She also served on the advisory council of the Women's Project at the American Place Theater.

Subsequently Cai earned an M.F.A. in filmmaking and worked in film in New York and Los Angeles.  She has written ten optioned feature screenplays, teleplays for the CBS TV series "The Trials of Rosie O'Neill" and the Bible for the CBS series "919 Fifth Avenue." She also wrote and directed the independent films A Man Around the House and "Higher Aspirations."

My View

I live in Eugene, Oregon with playwright Paul Calandrino. In addition to writing here, I teach writing on and off at the University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program, and I am raising my teenage son.

I am a transplanted person, a person who was raised on the East Coast and has migrated west due to Life Circumstances (see the Portland Monthly article), a person with many homes or no home, depending on the day you ask me.  I adore Eugene for its sense of community, for the strong friends I have here; I also miss New York City where I spent eleven very formative years.  Another bunch of very formative years were spent in a Boston suburb, some of which is being chronicled (loosely) in my third novel.