About Me

As a writer, I’ve published

Debby Mayer in blue shirt and cap.

  • A memoir, Riptides and Solaces Unforeseen—part mystery, part love story, part report from the medical front in the United States today

  • A novel, Sisters, in which a working artist overnight becomes the mother of an eight-year-old girl

  • Short stories in The New Yorker, Redbook, Ingenue and numerous literary magazines

  • Essays, including “10 Scary Things I Have Done Since My Husband Died,” published in Widows’ Words: Women Write on the Experience of Grief, the First Year, the Long Haul, and Everything in Between

  • Journalism for The Columbia Paper and The Independent (New York State)

As a talker, I’ve presented

  • Numerous readings, workshops and performances from my fiction, memoir and essays in libraries, bookstores and community centers, such as:

  • The reprise of Real People Real Stories, presented virtually from the Ancram (NY) Opera House to a national audience, updating the story I first told at the AOH five years before

  • Workshops from “10 Scary Things I Have Done Since My Husband Died” at Oasis San Diego and at Interim Health Care, San Diego

  • “Go West, Old Woman” in So Say We All’s VAMP storytelling program at the Whistle Stop Bar, San Diego

  • Keynote speech from Riptides, on compassionate health-care communication, to communications students at Iona College, New Rochelle, NY

  • Multiple workshops on compassionate health care, based on Riptides, with communications and health-services students

I’m thrilled to have won some awards

  • Two grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, one in creative nonfiction for “Therapy Dogs,” an excerpt from Riptides, and one in fiction, for “The Secretary,” a short story published in The New Yorker

  • For Sisters, the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award from City College of New York

  • For an excerpt from Sisters, a Creative Artists Public Service grant in Fiction

  • From the Dog Writers Association of America, for “An Old Dog’s Winter Night,” the best essay published in a newspaper with a circulation under 150,000

    Day jobs, degrees

  • My day jobs were in arts administration (Publications Director, Poets & Writers, Inc.) and editing (Editorial Director, Publications Office, Bard College, and contributing editor, The Columbia Paper in Columbia County, New York).

  • Yes, I have two degrees, a B.A. from Skidmore College and an M.A. in Creative Writing from City College.