After graduating from HWS, Bank worked as an editorial assistant at the Putnam Publishing Group in New York City and took fiction-writing courses at Columbia. In 1985, she went to graduate school at Cornell, where she received an M.F.A. in fiction and went on to teach undergraduate writing courses in fiction, autobiography and film. For the next eight years, she worked as a copywriter at the advertising agency McCann Erickson in New York City and wrote short stories at night and on weekends. In 1993, she received the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award for short fiction.
In February of 1998, Bank's book, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, received one of the largest advances for short stories in the history of publishing. The book, a semi-autobiographical collection of connected short stories, spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was published in over 30 languages.
Bank divides her time between New York City and Sag Harbor, New York.
Contribution: Author of "The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing"
Hometown: New York, N.Y.
College Activities: William Smith Congress
Major: American Studies
Other Education: Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (M.F.A., 1988)