D iane Middlebrook is a professional writer, and a former Professor of English at Stanford University. Her most recent book is a biography of the creative partnership of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, titled Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage, published in hardcover by Viking in October 2003, and in paperback by Penguin Books in September 2004. In an advance review, Publisher's Weekly declared that Her Husband would become "the gold standard" of books about this famous literary couple. It became an L.A. Times best seller, and was featured in A&E’s Biography program on Sylvia Plath in May 2005. The introduction and sample reviews, along with interviews of Diane Middlebrook, can be found at Her Husband.

M iddlebrook's previously-published books include two other biographies. Suits Me is the story of Billy Tipton, a female jazz musician who lived as a man for fifty years. Published in May 1998 by Houghton Mifflin company, Suits Me: the Double Life of Billy Tipton became the best seller in its category on amazon.com, and was a finalist for a Lambda Foundation Literary Award. Anne Sexton, a Biography -- Middlebrook's book about the American poet who was a friend of Sylvia Plath-- was published in 1991 and spent eight weeks as a New York Times best seller. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and received the Gold Medal in Non-fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. Her next book will be a biography of the Roman poet Ovid, Ovid, to be published by Viking Press in 2008.

C urrently Diane Middlebrook is developing a program with the Stanford Alumni Association: the Stanford Book Salon, a virtual book group and online threaded discussion. The Book Salon begins its fourth year in autumn 2005, and has attracted over 2000 participants to date, from 47 states and 28 countries.

D iane Middlebrook has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the Stanford Humanities Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Study Center at Bellagio. She was a founding trustee of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, an interdisciplinary arts center in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She was a member of the Panel on Biography for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize, and chaired the Non-Fiction Panel for the National Book Award in 2004. In 2002, she stepped down from her position as Professor of English at Stanford University to become a writer full-time. Since 1987 she has had a second home in London; in 2004 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was appointed as an Honorary Member of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Her professional resume can be found here.

M iddlebrook's literary agent is Georges Borchardt, e-mail: office@gbagency.com