Here are some fun facts from imdb about Annie Proulx. (BTW, I love that she's such a late-bloomer -- bachelor's degree at 34, first novel at 56 -- which gives hope to the rest of us aging underachievers!)
Won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Shipping News.
BA, University of Vermont (1969); MA, Sir George Williams University (1973)
Supported herself and three sons by writing how-to books. Published her first novel, Postcards (1992), when she was 56.
Surname pronounced "Proo."
Her short story "Brokeback Mountain," which contains a character who is killed in a Wyoming gay-bashing, was published in The New Yorker in 1997, almost exactly one year before the real-life murder of gay Wyoming man Matthew Shepard. Proulx, who lived close to where Shepard was beaten, was called to but not selected for jury duty for the trial of Shepard's murders. (Wow! I hadn't heard that one before. Guess she might have had a little trouble getting past the voir dire, hunh?)
Attended (but did not graduate from) Colby College in Waterville, Maine.