Deborah Eisenberg (born November 20, 1945) is an American short-story writer, actress and teacher. She is is a professor of writing at Columbia University.Eisenberg was born in Winnetka, Illinois. Her family was Jewish. She grew up in suburban Chicago, Illinois, and moved to New York City in the late 1960s.Eisenberg was an editorial assistant at The New York Review of Books in 1973. She taught at the University of Virginia from 1994 until 2011, when she accepted a teaching position at Columbia University's MFA writing program. Wikipedia