Deb Olin Unferth

Deb Olin Unferth (born November 19, 1968) is an American author. She has published two novels, two books of short stories, a memoir, and a graphic novel. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over fifty magazines and journals, including Harper's, The New York Times, The Paris Review The Believer, McSweeney's, Granta The Guardian, and NOON. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and she has received a Guggenheim fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Capital Fellowship for Innovative Literature, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell and Yaddo Foundations.

She grew up in Chicago. She has an MFA from Syracuse University, where she studied with George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, and Michael Martone.

She became a vegan in 2008. In 2020 she published the novel Barn 8, which is about the personhood of chickens and industrial egg farming. For the book, she did extensive research, which appears in a longform article in Harper's Magazine. The New York Times called Barn 8, "a beautiful, urgent, politically charged book.'"'

In 1987, as a freshman in college studying liberation theology, she dropped out of school and traveled through Central America interviewing and writing about key political and religious figures involved in the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, the Sandinista revolutionary government in Nicaragua, and the Noriega dictatorship in Panama. These travels formed the basis of her memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, published by Holt in 2011, which was a finalist for a 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her first book of stories, Minor Robberies, appeared in a box with two other books of stories, by Dave Eggers and Sarah Manguso. The box of books was published by McSweeney's.

Her first novel, Vacation, was also published by McSweeney's, in 2007.

She is married to the philosophy professor Matt Evans, who specializes in ancient Greek philosophy.