Cai Emmons

Consultant for Telling

Cai began her career as a dramatist. 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 served on the advisory council of the Women's Project at the American Place Theater; and she was twice a playwright-in-residence at The Albee Foundation's "Barn" in Montauk, New York. Subsequently she worked in film in New York and Los Angeles. She has written ten optioned feature screenplays, teleplays for the CBS television 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." Cai Emmons's novel, His Mother's Son, was published by Harcourt in January of 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 January of 2004. Cai has taught at the University of Southern California, U.C.L.A., and Orange Coast College. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Her latest novel, The Stylist, was published September 2007.