Patricia Eakins is the author of The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last, a novel that has been awarded New York University Press's Prize for Fiction as well as the Capricorn Prize for Fiction of the Writer's Voice. It was published by NYU Press in Spring 1999. Making use of eighteenth-century narrative conventions, Eakins's novel portrays a slave marooned on an island, who bears children with underwater paramours and creates a whole new culture for himself and his children, in a world he can claim as his own. An excerpt from the novel appeared in the October 1998 issue of Sources, the journal of the Center for Anglophone Studies at the University of Orléans, France. Other excerpts have been published in Parnassus, The Iowa Review and The Paris Review, which awarded Eakins the 1996 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

Eakins is also the author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories (San Francisco: Cadmus Editions, 1988). The New York Times Book Review characterized this collection as "triumphantly quirky." Her tales deal with outlandish characters, remote in time and place, and sound like exotic fables from other days, yet they are strangely revealing of our own times. The title story, "The Hungry Girls," which received a Charles Angoff award for "Outstanding contribution" from The Literary Review, is set in nineteenth-century Normandy and sustains a Rabelaisian capacity for larger-than-life bodily functions which humorously set back the limits of plausible proprieties. Other stories take place in what could be medieval Japan ("Milady's Ploy"), or in the East of the Thousand and One Nights ("Snakeskins"), or on a South Pacific Atoll after an atomic disaster ("The Change"), or in the mythological time of Ovid's Metamorphoses ("Auravir"). Mainly, the stories take place in a country of the mind remote enough to feel strange and yet close to our sense of actual history and culture.

Eakins's work as been anthologized in Transgression: The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Fiction, in Vital Lines: Contemporary Fiction about Medicine, and in the UK's Storia. She has also been published in such journals as Fiction International, Chicago Review, and Conjunctions. Papers from the 1999 Reading Eakins Conference at the University of Orléans, France, will be published in 2000 as Cahiers de Lolita, Volume 1, No. 1, by the University Press of Orléans.

The fiction of Patricia Eakins has been adapted for the theater by the Collision Theory Ensemble, whose production of The Hungry Girls: A Fairy Tale premiered in New York City in August 1997 and was revived in August 1998 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Eakins has twice been a creative-writing fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, has been a Fiction Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has been Writer-in-Residence at the Woodstock Guild, Woodstock, New York.

She has taught at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), NYU, The New School, and New York Institute of Technology. She is currently editor-in-chief of the literary web site Frigate: the Transverse Review of Books (www.frigatezine.com).

Eakins's works-in-progress include a novel about the Catskill Mountains that casts a critical eye on the pastoral experience, a group of short stories that examine collisions between urban and rural life, an audio anthology of her fiction, and a volume of polemical essays and essay fictions. She is on the advisory panel for the interior-design publication program at Fairchild Books, and her textbook Writing for Interior Design will appear from Fairchild in December, 2004.