Leila Philip

Leila Philip is the author of The Road Through Miyama, (Random House 1989, Vintage 1991, 1992) for which she received the Martha Albrand Citation for Nonfiction in 1990; Hidden Dialogue; A Discussion Between Women in Japan and the United States (Japan Society Public Affairs Publishing Program 1993; and her most recent book, the award-winning memoir, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family (Viking 2001, Penguin 2002). Her writing has been recognized by numerous awards including fellowships from The National Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Radcliffe Research and Study Center, The American Association of University Women, the Deming Memorial Fund and the Futhermore Foundation. She has been the James Thurber Writer in Residence at the Ohio State University and a Granville Hicks endowed resident at Yaddo.

She received an A.B (cum laude) from Princeton University in 1986 as well as a Fifth Year Degree in East Asian Studies. During her studies at Princeton she spent a summer at Middlebury’s Intensive Language Program in Japanese and won Princeton’s Thesis Prize in East Asian Studies. In 1990 she received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University where she won a School of the Arts Fellowship and a Woolrich Scholarship in Fiction. In 1992, she was awarded Bunting Fellowship in creative writing at the Radcliffe Research and Study Center and attended classes at Harvard.

Leila grew up in New York City where she attended public elementary school and then Hunter High School. When she was fifteen, her family moved to the Hudson Valley in order to save a family farm that she would discover while researching A Family Place, has been owned and farmed by her family for almost three centuries. She finished high school at the Northfield, Mt. Hermon School in Northfield, Mass. After high school, Leila took a year off and worked on The Hudson Valley Chronicle, a small newspaper published in Hudson, NY. She wrote features articles, delivered newspapers and ended up editing and writing entire sections of the paper. Then she went west, first to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, then on to Oregon where she worked on a sheep ranch near Coos Bay. When the lambing season was over, she joined a tree-planting cooperative based in Roseburg. She earned enough to start college planting evergreen trees in the mountains of southern Oregon and fell in love with the mountains there. Throughout college she spent summers in Oregon, working as a Cheetah ranger. After studying Japanese and medieval Japanese literature at Princeton, she headed to Japan where she apprenticed to a master potter in Southern Kyushu. That experience was the subject of her first book, The Road Through Miyama. She has worked as an interpreter (Japanese) and guide (Japan) for the Smithsonian Institution and the New York Japan Society.

Her work has been anthologized in a number of books, among them: Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers, (Vintage 1993); Writing Down the River--winner of the Willa Cather Literary Award for Memoir and Essay (Northland Press 1997); Family Travels: The Farther You Go the Closer You Get (Traveler’s Tales 1999); Japan: True Stories of Life on the Road (Traveler’s Tales 1999), A Woman’s Passion for Travel (Traveler’s Tales 1999). She is the author of numerous articles and reviews in newspapers, magazines and journals including The Boston Globe, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The San Jose Mercury News, The Christian Science Monitor, Ohio Magazine, Winds Magazine, The Yomiuri Shimbun and the Daily Yomiuri. She is a currently a contributing writer for Our Town, a quarterly dedicated to writing about life in the Hudson Valley.

She has taught writing and literature at Princeton, Columbia, Emerson College, Colgate, Vassar and at the Ohio University. She has taught in summer writing conferences including Breadloaf and the Chenango Writers’s Conference. In 2004 she joined the English department at the College of the Holy Cross where she has been the acting director of the Program in Creative Writing and teaches creative writing and literature. Ms. Philip lives in Woodstock, CT with her husband and son, one dog, two cats, two lizards and a large, unruly garden.