[1] Jane Vandenburgh was born in Berkeley, California and grew up in Redondo Beach and in the San Fernando Valley.
[citation needed] The title story of her master's thesis, The Salisbury Court Reporter, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for fiction in 1981.
Vandenburgh is the author of two novels, Failure to Zig-Zag (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1989), The Physics of Sunset (Pantheon 1999), and two books of memoir, A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century (Counterpoint 2009), and The Wrong Dog Dream: A True Romance (Counterpoint, 2013), which is an intense parallel narrative of dog ownership and a new marriage while living in Washington, D.C..[1][3][4] Vandenburgh's book on the craft of fiction, The Architecture of the Novel: A Writer's Handbook (Counterpoint 2010) is a philosophical exploration of the structural elements of long-form fiction, with an introduction by writer Anne Lamott.
Once a recipient of the Mildred Sherrod Bissinger Memorial Endowed Fellowship, Vandenburgh now teaches a yearlong course in the book length narrative through the Djerassi Artists Residency program in Woodside, California,[5] as well as an annual workshop at Fishtrap: Writing and the West in Oregon.
[citation needed] She is married to Jack Shoemaker, Editorial Director and Vice-President at Counterpoint Press in a Berkeley, California, longtime publisher of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, among many other writers.