Biography

Nani Power was born in Los Angeles, California, and then later raised in a small town in Virginia. Although she has lived in Brazil and New York for many years, Power now lives back in rural Virginia.

Power studied fine arts/ painting primarily in her early years, at Bennington College and later receiving a painting scholarship at the prestigious Nadia Boulanger’s Ecole des Beaux-Artes Americaines in Fontainebleau, France.

In her late thirties, Power took a writing class at Georgetown University with Liam Callanan and went on to publish Crawling at Night (Grove/Atlantic Monthly, 2001), a New York Times Notable Book of The Year and a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Award as well as the British Orange Award. It has been translated into seven languages and is in film production.

Power had worked as a manager, waitress and even a brief stint as a chef in a Japanese restaurant and felt haunted by the cultural difficulties an old chef encountered: “although he had been educated so well in the art of sushi, because of his faulty English he was treated like an old fool and I could see the pain in his eyes.” From this emerged a powerful tale of urban alienation and love set in a Manhattan cityscape. Power goes on to add, “I was deeply affected by the respectful Japanese attitude towards food as a cultural icon. The intense dedication and perfection amazed me. And the chefs were mindful of my respect, teaching me as much as I wanted to learn.” A later food research trip to Japan fostered much of the accurate detail in the book on the culture of Sushi.

Her second novel, The Good Remains (Grove/Atlantic Monthly, 2002), was also a New York Times Notable Book of The Year, and a finalist for The Virginia Library Award. “In this book,” Power explains, “I strove to paint an entirely different landscape than Crawling at Night. While Crawling at Night was about urban alienation, The Good Remains was about the connectedness of a small town. I also wished to pay tribute to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.”

The Sea of Tears, her third novel, was published in January 2005 by Counterpoint Press. “I felt a need to explore the only still ‘forbidden’ territory in writing—exploring the realm of true sentiment and feeling, without being hackneyed. A certain cynicism has been lauded in our culture as intellectualism, and I reject that concept. I also wanted to humanize characters from the Middle East, who I felt were being pigeonholed and overlooked culturally in the post 911 era.”

Her stories have been published in numerous literary magazines including The Paris Review, Salon, Gargoyle and Nerve.com as well as two anthologies Sex & Chocolate: Tasty Morsels for Mind and Body edited by Lucinda Ebersole & Richard Peabody and Grace and Gravity: Fiction by Washington Area Women, also edited by Richard Peabody. In The Blood, a one-act play, was produced in November 2004 at the Mead Theater Workshop in Washington, D.C.

Her newest book, a food memoir, called Feed the Hungry will be published by Simon and Schuster in June 2008.