Michelle Falkoff

Falkoff was born and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts. She spent the bulk of her childhood reading and then went off to study literature at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After that, Falkoff attended Columbia Law School in New York and became an intellectual property litigator in Silicon Valley. She shares that her weirdest case involved a battle over the patent for the variant of blue-green algae that makes farm-raised salmon turn pink when they eat it. She soon quit practicing law to study fiction writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and ever since then, she’s been teaching legal writing and fiction writing and writing novels. Currently, Falkoff serves as the Director of the Communication and Legal Reasoning program at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and teaches fiction at the University of Chicago and elsewhere.