About the Author
Cathy Day was born and raised in Peru,
Indiana, which is best known as a circus town,
but is also the birthplace of Cole Porter and
the Spanish hot dog. She is the author of two
books. Her most recent work is Comeback
Season: How I Learned to Play the Game
of Love (Free Press, 2008), part memoir about life
as a single woman and part sports story about the Indianapolis Colts Super Bowl season. Her first book was The Circus in Winter (Harcourt, 2004), a fictional history of her hometown.
The Circus in Winter was a finalist for three book contests: the Story Prize, the Great Lakes Book Award, and the GLCA New Writer Award. It was a Barnes & Noble "Discover" selection, an "Original Voices" pick at Borders, and a Best Book of 2004 on Amazon.com. Circus has been translated into both German and Czech. Her fiction and nonfiction have been broadcast on NPR's " Selected Shorts" and "Studio 360" and appeared in The Antioch Review, River Styx, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Story, Cream City Review, Gettysburg Review, and American Fiction, among others.
Strange but true: The Circus in Winter was the solution to the New York Times Magazine acrostic puzzle in February 2005.
Cathy has received grants and fellowships from the New Jersey Arts Council, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Bush Foundation. Day earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama (Roll Tide!), her B.A. at DePauw University (Go Tigers!), and has taught at Minnesota State University, Mankato and The College of New Jersey. Currently, she splits her time between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she teaches fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh, and southeastern Indiana, where her family resides.