Grace Paley (December 11, 1922 – August 22, 2007), née Goodside, was an American short story author, poet, teacher, and political activist.

[3] Beyond her work as an author and university professor, Paley was a feminist and anti-war activist, describing herself as a "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.

[2][4] They had immigrated 16 or 17 years earlier (in 1906, by one account[2]),[4] following a period under the rule of Ukraine by Czar Nicholas II that saw their exile, her mother to Germany and her father to Siberia—with the change of name from Gutseit as they began their new life in New York.

After dropping out of high school at sixteen,[6] Grace Goodside attended Hunter College for a year (spanning 1938 and 1939[7]), then married a film cameraman, Jess Paley, when she was 19,[2] on June 20, 1942.

[6][8] Writing to introduce an interview in The Paris Review, Jonathan Dee, Barbara Jones, and Larissa MacFarquhar note thatWriting has only occasionally been Paley’s main occupation.

She has always been very active in the feminist and peace movements...[4] Paley studied briefly with W. H. Auden, at the New School, when she was 17,[5] pursuing a hope to be a poet.

[7] With the encouragement of her friend and neighbor Donald Barthelme,[6][4] Paley assembled a second collection of fiction in 1974, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

[2] This collection of seventeen stories features several recurring characters from Little Disturbances (most notably the narrator "Faith," but also including John Raftery and his mother), while continuing Paley's exploration of racial, gender, and class issues.

[9] The long story "Faith in a Tree," positioned roughly at the center of the collection, brings a number of characters and themes from the stories together on a Saturday afternoon at the park; in it, Faith, the narrator, climbs a tree to get a broader perspective on both her neighbors and the "man-wide world" and, after encountering several war protesters, declares a new social and political commitment.

[9] The collection's shifting narrative voice, metafictive qualities and fragmented, incomplete plots have led some critics to classify it as a postmodernist work.

[2][13][14][15][16] In Later the Same Day (1985), also published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux,[2] Paley continues the stories of Faith and her neighbors—but somewhat expanded, with the addition of more black and lesbian voices.

"[2] As one editor who worked with Paley wrote, "Her characters are people who smell of onions, yell at each other, mourn in darkened kitchens.

"[2] Although more widely known for her short fiction, Paley also published several volumes of poetry including Leaning Forward (1985)[20] and New and Collected Poems (1992).

Paley began to teach writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1966 (through to 1989)[27] and helped to found the Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York in the late 1960s.

[34] In the 1980s Paley supported efforts to improve human rights and resist U.S. military intervention in Central America,[40][41][42] and she continued to speak out in her final years against the Iraq War.

[7] Paley's Jewish background was a vital part of her identity and work, and she found community in her local synagogue in Vermont in her later years,[8] she was raised agnostic, with her father refusing to go to temple entirely.

[3] Paley began spending summers in Thetford, Vermont, with Nichols beginning in the 1970s; the couple eventually settled there permanently in the early '90s.