Goldie Goldbloom was born in Western Australia but currently lives in Chicago, Illinois with her eight children and her cat. She has a thing for lying on her back and watching the sky in winter. She also likes to walk barefoot in mud.

For close to twenty years, she worked as a teacher in both high school and elementary school, and as a particular kind of nerdy librarian. Some of her first jobs were cooking vast quantities of apple sauce, cracking open eggs for a bakery and weaving in the loose threads of cardigans. Of the various things she’s studied, she particularly enjoys botany and midwifery. She is a chassidic Jew.

Her short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly and Narrative Magazine and is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner and in an anthology of emerging Australian writers. She won the International fiction prize in the Jerusalem Post’s “My Jerusalem” competition, and has been a finalist at Glimmertrain.

Her non-fiction has appeared in The World Jewish Digest, Wellsprings, and is forthcoming in Keep Your Wives Away From Them.

Her first novel, “The Paperbark Shoe” (Aust) /”Toads’ Museum of Freaks and Wonders” (US), won the 2008 AWP Novel Award.