Writer in Residence will Present a Reading at Yale

Anne Fadiman, the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale, will give a public reading on September 28 at 8 p.m. in Room 211, Hall of Graduate Studies, 320 York St.

The event is free and open to the public.

Fadiman is the first Francis Writer in Residence, a three-year position she assumed in January 2005. The Francis Writer in Residence program was established by Yale alumnus Paul E. Francis, Class of 1977, to bring a distinguished writer of non-fiction to campus to teach during the academic year and engage actively with undergraduates, serving as an academic mentor to students through seminars, readings and other activities. Fadiman teaches a nonfiction writing seminar each term and advises the editors of several undergraduate publications as well as students who are thinking about becoming nonfiction writers and editors.

The reading is the second in a series of “Francis Conversations,” sponsored by the Yale College Dean’s Office. Fadiman will read from and discuss her essays and articles, including a piece about the experience of rereading that was published September 14 as the introduction to “Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

“It’s a privilege being surrounded by students so full of energy, enthusiasm, talent, and hope,” she says. “They’re just beginning to step off the precipice from the familiar terra firma of academic writing into the shark-filled waters of creative nonfiction, and I’m thrilled to see them take that risk. Being here makes me remember my own tentative beginnings as a writer. The main difference is that when I was their age, I wasn’t anywhere near as good as some of them.”

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 non-fiction, 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 the tragic miscommunication between them and their American doctors. “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), her second book, is a collection of personal essays about her lifelong love of books and language.

Fadiman edited The American Scholar, a quarterly journal published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society, from 1988 through 2004. Under her leadership, the journal won three National Magazine Awards and was nominated for eight others. She is the editor of “Best American Essays 2003” (Houghton Mifflin). Her own writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. She has won two National Magazine Awards for her writing.