Amy Hempel  (b. 1951) In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried LINKS No links found. BIOGRAPHY Amy Hempel (b. 1951)  Hempel was born in Chicago and spent her early years in California, where she attended Whittier College and San Francisco State College—"your basic non-linear education," she called it. She moved to New York to pursue a career in writing and was for a time a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine. Some of her unhappy experiences as a struggling writer in New York as well as the deaths of family members provide much of the material for Reasons to Live (1985), a collection of stories set in California, which grew out of a fiction workshop she attended at Columbia University in 1982. In many of these stories, her protagonists struggle against the alienating culture of California. Her collections of stories include At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom (1990) and Tumble Home (1997). She has edited, with Jim Shepard, Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs (1995). "I am really interested in resilience," Hempel recently told an interviewer. "Dr. Christiaan Barnard said, 'Suffering isn't ennobling, recovery is.' If I have a motto for this particular bunch of stories, that's what it is."