Noted Author to Be Writer in Residence at Yale

Prize-winning author Anne Fadiman has been appointed the first Francis Writer in Residence in Yale College.

Fadiman will be at Yale for three years, beginning January 2005.

The Francis Writer in Residence, established recently by Paul E. Francis, Class of 1977, is to be a distinguished writer of non-fiction who will teach during the academic year, engaging actively with undergraduates and serving as an academic mentor to students through seminars, readings, open office hours and other appropriate activities. Candidates will be selected from both traditional University sources and through recommendations from noted Yale alumni in the field of non-fiction writing.

“I’m delighted with this appointment,” said Richard Brodhead, dean of Yale College and the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English. “In addition to being a wonderfully fluent and adventurous writer, Anne Fadiman has a passion for supporting the writing of others. She will make a memorable teacher and intends to participate in the full life of this place.”

Fadiman’s first book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the Salon Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Boston Book Review Award. It tells the story of a refugee family from Laos and its cross-cultural conflicts with the American medical system.

“Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), Fadiman’s second book, is a collection of witty personal essays about her lifelong love of books and language.

Since 1998, Fadiman has been the editor of The American Scholar, a quarterly published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. During her editorship, the journal has received three National Magazine Awards and been nominated for eight others. She has published work by Nicholson Baker, J.M. Coetzee, Cynthia Ozick, Oliver Sacks, John Updike, Garry Wills and many other notable writers. She is currently editing “Rereadings,” a collection of literary essays from The American Scholar, to be published in 2005 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Fadiman is the editor of “Best American Essays 2003” (Houghton Mifflin). Her own essays and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has won two National Magazine Awards for her writing.