Joan Wickersham and James Wood

Joan Wickersham and James Wood
Friday, Jan 13 2017, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM, Tishman Lecture Hall
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Friday, Jan 13 2017 7:00 PM Friday, Jan 13 2017 8:00 PM America/New_York Joan Wickersham and James Wood OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Faculty member Joan Wickersham and James Wood will read as part of the Writers Reading series. Tishman Lecture Hall Bennington College

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | The New York Times writes of Joan Wickersham's novel, The News from Spain that her “gift is for capturing the habits of mind that lead even smart people to deceive themselves.” Her memoir, The Suicide Index, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Joan Wickersham's most recent book, The News from Spain (Knopf) was named one of the year’s best fiction picks by National Public Radio, Kirkus Reviews and The San Francisco Chronicle. Her memoir The Suicide Index (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was a National Book Award finalist. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, Agni, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and many other publications. Joan is a regular op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe and her pieces have run in The International Herald Tribune and on NPR. She has a BA in art history from Yale, has taught writing at Emerson and Harvard, and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo.

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian, in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His critical essays have been collected in four volumes, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999), The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (2013), and The Nearest Thing to Life (2015).  He is also the author of a novel, The Book Against God (2003), and a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works (2008). He lives in Boston, and teaches half time at Harvard University, where he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism.