Lidia Yuknavitch

Random House published Yuknavitch's first short story collection, Verge, on February 4, 2020. Yuknavitch read one of the stories, "Street Walker," on the December 10, 2019, episode of the Lit Hub/Podglomerate Storybound podcast, accompanied by original musical composition from the band Whiston & Warmack.

The Small Backs of Children, published in 2015, was praised by Kirkus Reviews, in which it was called a "brave and affecting novel."

Dora: A Headcase, is Yuknavitch's novel about "Dora", the subject of a famous case study by Sigmund Freud. The subject of the study had lost her voice. Yuknavitch wrote that she wanted to "give Dora back her voice and 'talk back' to Freud." In 2014, the book was optioned for a movie by Katherine Brooks.

Yuknavitch's 2011 memoir, The Chronology of Water, has developed a cult following, and it was noted in a Huffington Post book review that two years after being published, the book "keeps popping up on blogs and social media feeds". She said she started writing the book as a kind of dare after talking to Chuck Palahniuk about memoir at the end of a meeting of their writers' group. The title comes from a short story Yuknavitch wrote in a writing workshop with Diana Abu-Jaber. The photograph on the book jacket depicts a naked woman in the water. Yuknavitch and her publisher opted to wrap the book in a "belly band" in order to cover the woman's breast. Yuknavitch wrote about this decision in The Rumpus.

In 1987–1988, Yuknavitch, then known as Lidia Yukman, collaborated with a novel-writing class at the University of Oregon taught by Ken Kesey that produced the book Caverns. Although the group of novelists, collectively named "O. U. Levon", are often described as graduate students, Yuknavitch was not actually in graduate school at the time.

Yuknavitch relocated to Texas after high school, where she attended Austin Community College on a swimming scholarship; while attending college, she worked as a receptionist at the University of Texas at Austin. Yuknavitch had hopes of qualifying for the United States Olympic swimming team, but the boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, as well as her own drug and alcohol abuse, ended her competitive swimming career.

Lidia Yuknavitch (born June 18, 1963) is an American writer, teacher and editor based in Oregon. She is the author of the memoir The Chronology of Water, and the novels The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and The Book of Joan. She is also known for her TED talk "The Beauty of Being a Misfit", which has been viewed over 3.2 million times, and her follow-up book The Misfit's Manifesto.