Award-Winning Author, Essayist, and Journalist Anne Fadiman to Deliver Free Public Reading at Pitt April 15

PITTSBURGH—Award-winning nonfiction author, essayist, and journalist Anne Fadiman will deliver a reading drawn from her works at 8:30 p.m. April 15 in the University of Pittsburgh’s Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 650 Schenley Dr., Oakland. Fadiman serves as Yale University’s inaugural Francis Writer in Residence, that university’s first endowed appointment in nonfiction, established in 2004.

Fadiman’s free public reading concludes Pitt’s 2012-13 Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series.

Fadiman is best known as the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), which gives an account of a refugee Laotian family in Merced, Calif., and its cultural conflicts with the American medical system in the 1980s. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award. Her other notable works include the essay collections At Large and At Small (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) and Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

A former staff writer for LIFE magazine, Fadiman’s essays and articles have appeared in such publications as Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.

Fadiman served as editor of the book Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). She was a founding editor of Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, and she was editor of The American Scholar, the quarterly literary magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, from 1998 to 2004. In 2003, Fadiman was selected to edit the compilation Best American Essays 2003 (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), a distinction bestowed to a different prominent writer each year.

A native of New York City, Fadiman earned a Bachelors of Arts degree at Harvard University in 1975. She is the daughter of the late author, editor, and radio and television host Clifton Fadiman.

The University of Pittsburgh Writing Program and The Book Center are cosponsors of the 2012-13 Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series season. Call 412-624-6508 or visit http://pghwriterseries.wordpress.com for more information.

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