About
Margot is the prizewinning author of a collection of personal essays, Secret Agent Man (Barrow Street, 2025), a novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House, 2017), and a collection of short stories, The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007). She is also the co-editor, with Nicole Walker, of Bending Genre (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 2nd ed. 2023), a collection of critical essays on creative nonfiction.
Singer’s short stories and essays have appeared in literary journals such as Agni, Conjunctions, the Gettysburg Review, the Kenyon Review, the Normal School, Shenandoah, The Sun, and elsewhere.
Underground Fugue received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish-American Fiction, the Nancy Dasher Award (given by the College English Association of Ohio), and was short-listed (final 5) for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
The Pale of Settlement won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize, and the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers, and received an Honorable Mention from the judges of the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Singer has also been awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artists Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Prose, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and the Thomas H. Carter Prize for the Essay, as well as artist’s residencies at Ucross, Radgale, and Yaddo.
Professor of English, the Director of Creative Writing, and the Director of Strategy for the Arts, Margot has taught at Denison University for 20 years. From 2013-19, she served as the Director of the Lisska Center for Scholarly Engagement, Denison’s fellowships office. She has been recognized with the Bonar Family Mentorship and Teaching Award, the Dominick Consolo Endowed Professorship, and the Bosler Endowed Faculty Fellowship.
Margot holds a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from the University of Utah; an M.Phil. in international relations from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar; and an A.B. in History and Literature, magna cum laude, from Harvard University. Before turning to writing full time, she spent ten years with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she was a principal in the New York Office.
Books
Secret Agent Man
Margot Singer
A striking collection of personal and poetic essays about memory and loss, obscurity and clarity, the search for identity and the meaning of home.
Award-winning short story author and novelist Margot Singer’s new essay collection, Secret Agent Man (Barrow Street Press | June 15), is a powerful exploration of family history, memory, and the meaning of home. The daughter and granddaughter of European Jews displaced by the Holocaust, Singer probes the nature of time and history, obscurity and clarity, displacement and loss. The title essay explores her memories of her father—was he or was he not a spy?—as it grapples with the riddle of whether our parents ever are who we imagine them to be. The impact of these essays is cumulative; page by page, they build into a moving examination of the mysteries and betrayals of the body, desire, artistic ambition, identity, and place.
Secret Agent Man traces Singer’s journey from her childhood in Boston, growing up with a father “who wasn’t like anybody else’s dad,” to her days as a high-powered management consultant in New York City, to her mid-life relocation to a small college town in the heart of the Midwest. Compelling, questioning, and yearning, this collection combines a poet’s engagement with language with the essayist’s intimate, reflective voice.
Underground Fugue
Margot Singer (Author)
Set against the backdrop of the tube bombings in London in 2005, Underground Fugue interweaves the stories of four characters who are dislocated by shock waves of personal loss, political violence, and, ultimately, betrayal.
It’s April and Esther has left New York for London, partly to escape her buckling marriage, and partly to care for her dying mother; Lonia, Esther’s mother, is haunted by memories of fleeing Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II; Javad, their next-door neighbor and an Iranian neuroscientist, struggles to connect with his college-aged son; and Amir, Javad’s son, is seeking both identity and escape in his illicit exploration of the city’s forbidden spaces.
As Esther settles into life in London, a friendship develops among them. But when terrorists attack the London transit system in July, someone goes missing, and the chaos that follows both fractures the possibilities for the future, and reveals the deep fault lines of the past.
With nuanced clarity and breathtaking grandeur, Margot Singer’s Underground Fugue is an elegant, suspenseful, and deeply powerful debut.
Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction
Margot Singer (Editor), Nicole Walker (Editor)
Ever since the term “creative nonfiction” first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction, Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways.
Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali–and in the new edition–Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer’s innovative essay probes our notions of genre and investigates how creative nonfiction is shaped, modeling the forms of writing being discussed. Like creative nonfiction itself, Bending Genre is an exciting hybrid that breaks new ground.
Features in the second edition:
-Updated introduction to the new edition
-Expanded sections on Hybrids, Structures, and “Unconventions”
-A new section on Resistances
-50 essays in all
The Pale of Settlement: Stories
Margot Singer (Author)
Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction
In settings from Jerusalem to Manhattan, from the archaeological ruins of the Galilee to Kathmandu, The Pale of Settlement gives us characters who struggle to piece together the history and myths of their family’s past.
This collection of linked short stories takes its title from the name of the western border region of the Russian empire within which Jews were required to live during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Susan, the stories’ main character, is a woman trapped in her own border region between youth and adulthood, familial roots in the Middle East and a typical American existence, the pull of Jewish tradition and the independence of a secular life.
In “Helicopter Days,” Susan discovers that the Israeli cousin she grew up with has joined a mysterious cult. “Lila’s Story” braids Susan’s memories of her grandmother—a German Jew arriving in Palestine to escape the Holocaust—with the story of her own affair with a married man and an invented narrative of her grandmother’s life. In “Borderland,” while trekking in Nepal, Susan meets an Israeli soldier who carries with him the terrible burden of his experience as a border guard in the Gaza Strip. And in the haunting title story, bedtime tales are set against acts of terrorism and memories of a love beyond reach. The stories of The Pale of Settlement explore the borderland between Israelis and American Jews, emigrants and expatriates, and vanished homelands and the dangerous world in which we live today.
Readings & Events
Literary Modiin (on Zoom)
Log onto Zoom for a virtual author reading featuring Danny Goodman, Emanuela Barasch Rubinstein, and Margot Singer
On Zoom (register by clicking on the link below)
Bexley (Ohio) Local Author Festival
Join us in the Bexley Public Library Auditorium for a local author festival! With more than 40 authors from Ohio and beyond, this is a wonderful opportunity to discover new books, meet authors, and take home signed books. This event is in partnership with Gramercy Books, who will be on hand to sell books.
Bexley Public Library, 2411 East Main St., Bexley, Ohio 43209
Granville Center for the Arts
Please join us for a special book launch featuring a reading and conversation between Margot and fellow author and Denison University professor Amy Butcher. Together, they'll dive into the book's themes of displacement, identity, and what it means to piece together a personal history shaped by global upheaval.
You'll have a chance to connect with the authors in the intimate, art-filled setting of the Granville Center for the Arts Gallery. Bring your curiosity and questions for the Q&A, then stick around to purchase a signed copy of Secret Agent Man, courtesy of our friends at Readers Garden Bookstore.
Granville Center for the Arts, 119 W Broadway, Granville, OH 43023
House of Speakeasy, “Seriously Entertaining”
What do you get when you cross the Queen’s English with New York attitude? Join us to find out. House of SpeakEasy teams up with the Association of Marshall Scholars for a transatlantic literary evening exploring how the U.S. and the U.K. remain two countries divided by a common language.
Hosted by Marshall scholar Bill Buford and Amanda Foreman, this show spotlights celebrated writers including Kaytie Nielsen, Margot Singer, Sejahari Saulter-Villegas, and Amanda Vaill as they explore language, identity, and the quirks of life on both sides of the pond.
Joe's Pub at the Public Theatre, 425 Lafayette St, New York, NY 10003
College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, Literary Arts Institute Visiting Writer Series
I will be in residence for a four-day residency in Nov. 2025, including a public reading, class visits, and individual meetings with students on their writing.
College of St. Benedict and St. John's University
Denison Alumni Event
Join fellow Indianapolis Denisonians for our annual Welcome to the City event!
Meet us at Half Liter for a moderated conversation with Denison professor of creative writing, Margot Singer. She will share more about her process for writing her new book, Secret Agent Man, as well as provide an update about Denison and the arts.
Attendees will also have time to meet and connect with other Denison alums and family members. Hors d'oeuvres will be provided and drinks will be available for purchase. All alums and their guests are welcome to attend this event. This is a great opportunity to connect with area Denisonians, and we hope to see you there!
Half Liter Brewery, Bar, & BBQ
Winthrop Avenue, Indianapolis, IN
Staenberg Loup Jewish Community Center (Denver, CO) Book Club
Book club discussion
Virtual
“Writing the Memoir My Father Never Could”
“Writing the Memoir My Father Never Could,” Lit Hub, July 9, 2025
Reviews & Recognition
——————Praise for Secret Agent Man——————
“An extremely poised and accomplished work of essayistic art in which Margot Singer explores a series of interconnected themes (privacy, security, dependence, independence, the presentation of self in everyday life) to arrive at a shattering insight that we already ‘know’’ but are afraid to acknowledge: we are all our own (best and worst) secret agents.
”—David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
“With a gossamer touch, Singer thoroughly probes the boundaries between truth and fiction. The results are haunting.”
”“Secret Agent Man is an insightful essay collection that fuses nostalgia with bittersweet retrospection.”
”— Foreword Reviews (starred review)
“This striking collection features essays that grapple with conflicts of perception and truth. Singer’s richly textured essays eloquently capture life’s weighty pulls.”
”— Booklist
“Secret Agent Man is simply brilliant! Margot Singer intricately weaves personal experience with fascinating research to explore nuances of family, self, and home. This collection becomes, as she puts it when describing a house, “…a container of memory, a receptacle of time.
”—Brenda Miller, author of A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form
“Margot Singer’s essay collection, Secret Agent Man, has much to offer us regarding the human desire for permanence and all that threatens it. I admire the way her mind moves as well as her gorgeous writing. This is a collection that leaves a lasting impression.”
”—Lee Martin, author of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Bright Forever
——————Praise for Underground Fugue——————
“An unusually layered debut … when terror strikes, the plot accelerates and the novel’s strands converge brilliantly.”
”“Subtle, affecting…The novel shimmers between meanings, never settling on the single one. It…continues to reverberate in the mind after its final words.”
”Margaret Quamme, the Columbus Dispatch
“Singer’s novel travels up and down the scale of sorrow, reflecting the musical and psychological connotations of her title… This haunting story… feels suspended in a murky state between memory and presence, happiness and despair.”
”Ron Charles, Washington Post
One of Elle’s “Most Anticipated Books by Women for 2017”
”“In this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel, Margot Singer confronts life’s essential losses—aging, illness, accidental death—but also the scalding, self-inflicted wounds of alienation, estrangement and prejudice. The book’s tender, questing spirit imbues even these dark recesses with a kind of luminosity, making Underground Fugue a pleasure to read from beginning to end.”
”Geraldine Brooks
——————Praise for Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction——————
While writers know that narratives are deliberate, linguistic constructions, oftentimes they and their readership are challenged by questions of “truthiness,” more often than not, so that their work can be pigeonholed into the appropriate genre. It is at this critical juncture that Margot Singer and Nicole Walker have entered the debate with their new anthology, Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, in order to think beyond the ethical questions of truthiness that have plagued literary writing.
”Marcie Bianco, Lambda Literary Review (June 2013)
——————Praise for The Pale of Settlement——————
These are very personal stories embedded in the public sphere–a deft braiding together of private life and the political and religious context in which desire unfolds. Margot Singer’s collection of interlinked tales is full of both promise and delivery: a first-rate debut.
Nicholas Delbanco, author of Spring and Fall
It is awe-inspiring to witness the nine converging storms in The Pale of Settlement. Readers yearning for the elemental forces to return to American fiction will applaud Margot Singer’s thundering debut.
”Kevin McIlvoy, author of The Complete History of New Mexico: Stories
THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT is a stunning collection of interwoven narratives that delves deep into the human need for both belonging and moral integrity. Singer examines origins, cruelties and beliefs in the context of the nefarious nature of memory as a vehicle for obtaining truth. While some of Singer’s characters are literally digging for material shards that might prove ancient texts valid, the ashes of another character are by chance winds. Impermanence and timeless truth struggle in these pages, finding characters, language and form that are at once recognizable and original.
”(Final judge, Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers)
The yearning for independence and the effort to sustain an identity pulsate throughout these masterful stories. A talented artist of the Jewish scene in Israel and the Diaspora, Singer is a new writer to savor.
”These short stories meander through time, back three generations, from a daughter to her mother to her mother’s mother, and back again. Susan, the American daughter of Israeli parents, struggles between cultures in the process of looking for herself–the same challenge undertaken by her mother as a young married emigrant in America and by her grandmother as a pioneer in the newly established State of Israel after the Holocaust. Singer explores each woman through her relationships, those that persist and those that fail, those that change and those that never even begin. Indeed, every story tells us a truth personal yet universal, relevant, and lasting. A winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Singer writes clearly, succinctly, and effectively. The characters are believable, and the stories uplifting but realistic. Modern issues–terrorism and the second Lebanon war–intrude, but do not overwhelm, a testament to Singer’s skill and artistry.
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