Susan Cheever and Jean Valentine

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Susan Cheever and Jean Valentine will read as part of the Writers Reading Series. 

Susan Cheever’s most recent book Drinking in America, a look at American History through the lens of alcoholism, was published in October 2016. Her most recent biography, E.E. Cummings: A Poet's Life, was published in February 2014. Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, was published in the fall of 2010 and a previous book on the American transcendentalists, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work was published in 2006. She has published seven other books of nonfiction and  five novels. Her short work has appeared in dozens of publications and anthologies including The New Yorker and The New York Times, and as a weekly column in Newsday where she contributed to coverage that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 after the crash of TWA Flight 800. She has been nominated for a National Book Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship medal and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the Authors Guild Council and the board of the Yaddo Corporation. Cheever took a BA from Brown and has taught at Yale, Brown University, The New School, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.  

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her 13th book of poetry is Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Jean was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. In 2014 she was given an award for exceptional accomplishment in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2017 she won The Bollinger Prize from Yale University. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, The Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.