The Gerber Institute for Catholic Studies

Reading from his book Exiles

Ron Hansen has written several award-winning books, including Exiles, Atticus, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction. Hansen has received many literary awards and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships in literature from the John Simon Guggenheim, Lyndhurst, and Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest foundations. He has held numerous teaching positions at prestigious universities around the country, and been awarded honorary doctorates from several Catholic colleges, institutes and schools of theology. He earned a master’s degree in Spirituality at Santa Clara University, where he is currently the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities. In 2007, he was ordained a permanent deacon for the Diocese of San Jose.

Biography

Ron Hansen was born, with his twin brother, Rob, in Omaha, Neb., on Dec. 8, 1947. Educated in English literature at Creighton University, from which he graduated in 1970, he served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., then studied under highly respected writers John Irving and John Cheever at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, where his classmates included T. C. Boyle and Allan Gurganus. Iowa awarded him an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in 1974.

While traveling Illinois as a textbook salesman for Random House, Hansen began work on his first novel, Desperadoes, writing much of it in motel rooms at night, and finishing it under the guidance of John L’Heureux at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. Hansen was a Jones Lecturer in Writing at Stanford when Desperadoes was published in 1979, and has since held numerous teaching positions at universities around the country while publishing his subsequent work: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), a children’s book, The Shadowmaker (1987), a book of stories, Nebraska (1989), and the novels, Mariette in Ecstasy (1991), Atticus (1996), Hitler’s Niece (1999), and the screwball comedy Isn’t It Romantic? (2003). He has also edited two short story anthologies, You Don’t Know What Love Is (1987) and You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe (1994). A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction, his first book of non-fiction, was published in 2001, and his most recent novel, Exiles, about Victorian-era priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the 1875 shipwreck of the Deutschland, was published just last year.

Hansen has twice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships in literature from the John Simon Guggenheim, Lyndhurst, and Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest foundations. Twice a finalist for a PEN/Faulkner Award, for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Atticus, he was also a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award for Atticus. Mariette in Ecstasy won the fiction prize from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association and the Gold Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Exiles was a finalist for the same award. Hansen’s novels and stories were recognized with an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1990.

Married to the writer Bo Caldwell, and the step-father of two children, Hansen has been awarded honorary doctorates from Spring Hill College in Alabama, Le Moyne College in New York, the Saint Thomas Aquinas Institute in St. Louis, the Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire, Loyola College in Baltimore, Md., and the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, Calif. In 1995 he earned an M.A. in Spirituality at Santa Clara University, where he is now the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities. On Jan. 13, 2007 he was ordained a permanent deacon for the Diocese of San Jose.