Sybil Baker - short biography

Sybil Baker’s novel,The Life Plan, was published by Casperian Books in spring 2009. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Transnational Literature, upstreet, and The Writer’s Chronicle. After living in South Korea and traveling extensively for twelve years, she returned with her South African husband to the States in 2007. She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and she earned her MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Sybil Baker - longer biography

Sybil Baker grew up in Northern Virginia and graduated from Virginia Tech where she was the features editor and humor columnist of the student newspaper, The Collegiate Times. After a few years working around Virginia, she moved to Boulder (Colorado) where she earned her MA degree in English from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

After five years in Colorado she moved back to Virginia and worked there as a technical editor before moving to South Korea in 1995. For the next twelve years she lived and taught English in South Korea and traveled extensively around the world, especially in Asia. So far she’s been to more than thirty countries, including Mongolia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia, Indonesia, Peru, and Turkey.

During her travels, she became increasingly interested in the allure and alienation of American travelers and expatriates, and this has heavily influenced her writing. Her novel, The Life Plan, was published by Casperian Books in spring 2009. In the novel, when Kat’s husband Dan enrolls for a course in Thailand to study massage, Kat is compelled to go with him to save the marriage. Soon Kat finds herself not only fighting for her marriage, but her career, and reputation as well. Yet when Kat has a chance to regain all that she has lost, she finally questions her own reasons for pursuing her rigid life plan.

Sybil Baker's fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals. Her essay on American expatriate literature appeared in AWP's Writer’s Chronicle in September 2005. In 2005, Sybil completed her MFA in Writing from The Vermont College of Fine Arts, and in 2007 moved to back to the States to teach creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where she is an Assistant Professor of English. She currently lives with her husband, Rowan Johnson, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.