During the Reign of the Queen of Persia

Joan Chase was born Joan Lucille Strausbaugh in Wooster, Ohio on November 26, 1936. She received a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Maryland in 1958 and worked as a librarian. Her first novel, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, was published in 1983 and won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Her other books included The Evening Wolves and Bonneville Blue. She also won a Whiting Foundation award in 1987, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize for fiction. She died on April 17, 2018 at the age of 81.

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