In her novels, Tova Mirvis returns to the themes of characters living in Orthodox communities while struggling with their faith. Mirvis graduated from Columbia University in 1995 and immediately went on to earn an MFA from Columbia in 1998. In 1999, she published her first novel, The Ladies’ Auxiliary, about a widowed convert entering the Orthodox community in Mirvis’s native Memphis. She followed this success with The Outside World in 2004 and Visible City in 2014. In 2009, Mirvis was a Scholar in Residence at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University, and the following year she was a Visiting Research Associate at the Brandeis Womens’ Studies Research Center.  She has published numerous essays in The New York Times Review of Books, Poets and Writers, and other periodicals. In 2017  Mirvis published a memoir, The Book of Separation, in which she discussed her divorce, her decision to leave the Orthodox community, and the bittersweet realities of navigating a new life as a single mother.