Rene Steinke's first novel, The Fires, was published by William Morrow in 1999, and the paperback version was published last year by HarperPerrenial. The novel was selected in 1999 by The Austin Chronicles as one of the best books of that year, and film rights to the novel have been optioned by Madonna 's production company, in partnership with Handprint Entertainment.
 
Steinke, an editor at The Literary Review, teaches literature and creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, where she is an Associate Professor. She is currently at work on her second novel, Holy Skirts.

Born in Richmond, Virginia, Steinke grew up in Friendswood, Texas. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, and her PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

She has published poems and stories in TriQuarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, Sundog, and The Carolina Quarterly. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize and three PSC-CUNY Research Foundation awards in creative writing.
 

Derek Alger: Your debut novel The Fires received very good reviews, how did the book come about, what was its evolution?

Rene Steinke: I knew I wanted to set the novel in Valpariso, Indiana, a small town I had come to know well, since I'd gone to college there. When I first arrived from the south, I had an image of the Midwest as this sort of clean, plain place, where people were well-behaved and a little boring, the usual cliche. But after I lived there for awhile, I began to  notice strange characters lurking around the edges of town, and I sometimes sensed a malevolent undertow in things. I wanted to somehow capture that.

DA: And your feelings were right on target.

RS: They were and they weren't. But I was interested in the darker side of things. I discovered that in the 20s, the Ku Klux Klan had almost bought the university I attended. There was also a famous case of a black family being basically harassed out of town. And I learned about a sort of legendary fire on the campus, in the administration building. It was definitely a case of arson, but the identity of the arsonist was a mystery. That's where the character of Ella came from. Although in the book, she doesn't set that particular fire, I invented her because I wondered about the fire in Kinsey Hall.