Mylène Dressler began her career as a novelist while still a graduate student at Rice University, penning her first book, The Medusa Tree, while completing her PhD in American Literature. The Medusa Tree (1997) was praised as “haunting” and “splendid” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, and dubbed a “lyrical and clearly envisioned debut novel” by Ms. Magazine. Dressler herself was hailed as a “natural-born storyteller” (Library Journal); she followed the success of her first book with the critically acclaimed The Deadwood Beetle (2001), an “intimate, elegantly written novel” (the Des Moines Register) praised by the Christian Science Monitor as “perfect.” Her work has been recognized with awards including a Fulbright Fellowship and numerous writing residencies, including those from the Hedgebrook Foundation and the Syvenna Foundation. In 2002 she was the winner of the prestigious Paisano Fellowship in Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, where she has also served as Visiting Writer. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters and with Larry McMurtry and Molly Ivins featured in Conversations with Texas Writers (2005), she has taught literature and writing at the University of Texas, Rice University, and the University of St. Thomas.

Born in 1963 in The Netherlands and emigrating to the United States with her family when she was a child, she has spent much of her life traveling outside America, visiting and studying in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Europe. Describing the range of settings and characters in her books, she has said: “As a writer living in the U.S. and more particularly in the South, I have to say I’m not at all interested in being bound by any one set of locations or human beings or ideas I’m ‘supposed’ to write about . . . and I’m lucky to be surrounded by and working within a literary culture that celebrates this . . . It’s the freedom of the novel that interests me, its breadth, its hunger. Whether I’m writing about a working-class family in Holland, or upper-class Americans squabbling in a beach house, or Indonesian women surviving in darkest wartime . . . whether it’s scientists or athletes or housemaids or ballet dancers or stockbrokers I’m turning my attention to, my goal as a writer isn’t all that different from my goal as a human being, which is to try to understand—and not predict or forejudge—the reality of the life of an individual or individuals somehow separate from and yet not unconnected, in the great scheme of being and imagining, to me. This is why, when I write, I often know only the beginning of the story . . . Narrative fate, plot, has to be open-ended, because it’s only the journey that can tell the writer where and how her characters have arrived . . . In that final moment, they must simply be allowed to be.”

Her work has been translated into several foreign languages, including French, Dutch, and Turkish, and is available in audio, Large Print, e-book and MP3-CD formats. Her third novel, The Floodmakers (2004), appears courtesy of G.P. Putnam’s Sons.