About the Author

Photo by Tami Turnbull

Ladette Randolph is the author of four books: two novels: Haven's Wake and A Sandhills Ballad, the short story collection This is Not the Tropics, and the memoir Leaving the Pink House (forthcoming in fall 2014). In addition, she has edited four anthologies: A Different Plain, The Big Empty, and two volumes of the Ploughshares Solos Omnibus. She has published stories and essays in numerous literary journals. Currently the editor-in-chief of the journal Ploughshares and on the faculty at Emerson College, she was, for many years, an acquiring editor at University of Nebraska Press and prior to that the managing editor of Prairie Schooner. She is the recipient of a Nebraska Book Award, a Rona Jaffe grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Virginia Faulkner award, and has been reprinted in Best New American Voices.  ( more )

Latest Reviews

praise for Leaving the Pink House :
“The land in Nebraska may be mostly flat, but it’s the sky that matters. “We were erased in that great expanse, and beneath it we knew our place,” writes Ladette Randolph. “We are all but annihilated under the burden of the sky.” In this lyrical, carefully observed memoir, Randolph tells of another burden: the fundamentalist Christianity of her childhood, a harsh faith that pushed her into marriage and from which she escaped, but not without pain. As the book opens, it’s the day after Sept. 11, 2001, and Randolph and her husband have just bought a wreck of a house in the country. In alternating chapters, she details the renovation and revisits her past; both processes involve demolition and reclamation. In the end, the book’s heart isn’t in its house; it’s in the people Randolph describes, these Nebraskans with “their sly irony, their dry sense of humor, their stubbornness, and their impatience with pretensions of any kind.” by Kate Tuttle”

—Boston Globe

praise for Leaving the Pink House :
“Ladette Randolph is both an editor and a writer; she is currently the editor of the fine literary magazine Ploughshares, whose founder, DeWitt Henry, I interviewed about that magazine’s history, and she’s written a total of four books and edited three more. She was previously an acquiring editor at University of Nebraska Press and earlier, the managing editor of Prairie Schooner. She has received four Nebraska Book Awards, a Rona Jaffe grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Virginia Faulkner award, and has been reprinted in Best New American Voices. Ladette grew up and lived much of her life in Nebraska. In this really well written and beautifully composed memoir, Leaving the Pink House, she tells the story of her life through the houses she has lived in. At first, the book appears to be a relatively straightforward memoir of buying a dilapidated farmhouse to fulfill a dream of country living (the day after September 11, 2001), and the complication of leaving the pink house she and her husband had already turned into the house of their dreams. But Randolph is writing to understand herself and where she comes from. Leaving one beloved house for another that is full of potential (for good and bad) spurs her into exploring her past life through the houses in which she lived. And she essentially tells herself – and her readers – where she came from, and how she became the person who is able to love and inhabit her own being in the present by exploring her life through the houses in which she lived from her early youth onward. Randolph grew up in small towns in Nebraska; her father took his family with him as he worked to become an evangelical minister. Randolph tells us what it was like for her to experience the world through the lens of fundamentalism as she grew up and then into her early adult years. She experiences a series of awakenings, tragedies and struggles, all told without over dramatization and alternating with the mundane and always challenging work of remodeling the old house in the country and preparing to move from the pink house. It’s an engaging and perceptive form of storytelling and much like a remodeling job itself, we learn with her as she goes through the work of tearing down and rebuilding the structure of her life. I greatly enjoyed reading this book, vicariously experiencing her challenges and accomplishments, and learning about her life experiences. Then having the opportunity to talk with Ladette about it only amplified my interest in her writing. by David Wilk”

—Writerscast

Network with Ladette

• Friend me on Facebook
• Join my Network on LinkedIn
• Audible Books version of A Sandhills Ballad
• Interview about Leaving the Pink House