Mindy Aloff

1987 Winner in
Nonfiction

Mindy Aloff’s essays, reviews, profiles, and interviews on literature and the performing arts have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies internationally, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. The editor of several books, most recently the Agnes de Mille reader, Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World (2011), Aloff is also the author of Dance Anecdotes: Stories From the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom, and Modern Dance (2006), Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation (2009), and Night Lights (1979), a collection of poetry. A former fellow of the Woodrow Wilson and John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundations, she teaches dance criticism and history and a course for freshmen in the personal essay at Barnard College.

Reviews & Praise

"Esteemed dance critic Aloff offers up a delicious and provocative pastiche of anecdotes from the world of dance . . . The stories are insightful, witty, occasionally juicy and often dark. Aloff is delightfully subjective and partial in her choices . . . This volume is destined to be bedside reading for those fond of backstage insight and intrigue." —Publishers Weekly [on Dance Anecdotes]

"In this delightful collection, Mindy Aloff redefines the notion of anecdote as topical fluff. While her book has its share of today's amusing stories, the reader will also find a range of subjects from Ancient Greece to the courts of France to Balanchine and a look, both serious and humorous, at such issues as stagefright, criticism, creativity, and backstage politics. Her selections are not only entertaining but informative." —Nancy Reynolds, Director of Research at the George Balanchine Foundation, and co-author of No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century [on Dance Anecdotes]

"Aloff, herself a fine writer and critic, has plucked the best of Agnes de Mille, one of the most vivid writers in dance, and made a bouquet of them that is as pungent as de Mille’s writing." —Alexandra Tomalonis, editor of Dance View [on Leaps in the Dark]

Selected Works

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