Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of thirteen books. Her novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage.

Valerie Miner's work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, Conditions, The T.L.S., The Women's Review of Books, The Nation and other journals. Her stories and essays are published in more than sixty anthologies. Her collaborative work includes books, museum exhibits as well as theatre.

She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources. She has had Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia and India. She has taught for over twenty-five years and won a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999 from the University of Minnesota. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures and workshops.

Valerie Miner is now an artist-in-residence at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and a professor at Stanford University, contributing to the Feminist Studies Program and English Department.

In a review of After Eden, Ainsley Drew comments: "Grief, environmentalism, immigration, homelessness and other significant issues are effortlessly woven in Valerie Miner's latest book that deals with a lesbian community in California. Heavy and hopeful, it's a must-read."

In a review of After Eden in The Noe Valley Voice, Critic Olivia Boler writes: “Published in April by the University of Oklahoma Press, it is the story of Emily Adams, a city planner from Chicago who finds herself staying on at her summer cabin in coastal California after she learns of the sudden death of her long-term partner, Salerno. “One of the novel’s themes is the contemplation of the search for home and how one person’s claim on it can cause another person to feel invaded,” says Miner. The story also deals with the clash between loggers and environmentalists, and with native Californians and the migrant workers who work the lush agricultural land of MacKenzie Valley (read Mendocino).”

A review of After Eden in Books to Watch Out For praises the novel as “a sometimes heartbreaking, but ultimately rejuvenative story of a woman’s journey through grief and rebirth, populated with an eclectic family of choice and a supportive brother who goes through his own changes, too.”

In a review of After Eden in The Hollins Critic, Kyle Deacon comments that “Miner raises the bar by framing Emily's course of self-repair with stunning lyrical prose and striking literary reinterpretations. The novel draws some of its inspiration from Milton's Paradise Lost, and Miner's modern revision provides a graceful correlation to the classic while adding depth to Emily's story.”