Cara Hoffman (edit name/settings)

CARA HOFFMAN is the author of So Much Pretty. Hoffman grew up in an economically depressed town in upstate New York, the home of two maximum security prisons. She dropped out of high school, bought a one-way ticket to London with her savings, and spent the next three years writing and working as an agricultural laborer and runner in Europe and the Middle East.

In the 1990s, she returned to the United States, became a mother, and began working as an investigative reporter at a daily newspaper. Hoffman covered New York State’s rural and Rust Belt communities for over a decade, reporting on environmental politics, county legislatures, and crime. In 2000 she received a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for her writing on the aesthetics of violence and its impact on children, a topic she would continue to research and explore through fiction.