Bio

Gabrielle Selz is the award-winning author of Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis. Her previous book, Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction (W.W. Norton, 2014), received the best memoir of the year award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors and was listed as a best book of 2014 by the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Growing up immersed in the art world, Gabrielle holds a special interest in the intersection of history, literature, art and memory.  In other words, how we comprehend and narrate our lives through words and images. She has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, More Magazine, and The Rumpus, among other publications. Her fiction has appeared in Fiction Magazine and her art criticism in Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Art & Object, and Newsday. She is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction and is a Moth Story Slam Winner.

As a teacher of Creative Non-Fiction, Gabrielle was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. She earned her BA in Art History from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her MA in Writing from City College in New York.

Gabrielle is a member of the San-Francisco-based writing group North 24th Writers, whose members have published more than two dozen non-fiction books. She has an adult son and lives in Oakland, California.