Celebrated author Anne Fadiman to speak at Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical University

Celebrated author Anne Fadiman to speak at Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical UniversityMarch 13, 2002Judy Holmesjlholmes@syr.edu

Award-winning author, essayist and editor Anne Fadiman will make two public appearances in Syracuse on April 8 and 9 as the guest of Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical University. The lectures are free and open to the public.

? Fadiman will present “Using Bacon for Bookmarks” at 7:30 p.m. April 8 in SU’s Maxwell Auditorium, where she will talk about issues related to her book “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

? “A Conversation with Anne Fadiman” will be presented from 11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m. April 9 in the Medical Alumni Auditorium of SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Weiskotten Hall, where she will talk about issues related to her book “The Spirit Catches You” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).

Fadiman’s visit to Syracuse is co-sponsored by The College of Arts and Sciences, the Honors Program and the Office of Undergraduate Studies at Syracuse University; and by the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, the Offices of the Provost and of the President, and the departments of Family Medicine, of Medicine and of Neurology at SUNY Upstate Medical University. During her visit, Fadiman will also meet in various small groups with selected Honors Program students, medical staff and others.

A former staff writer for Life magazine, Fadiman gained critical acclaim in 1997 with the publication of her first book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.” More than four years in the making, the book tells the story of a Hmong refugee family’s struggle with the American medical system over the care of their seriously ill daughter. The book won a 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Salon Book Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for nonfiction and the Boston Book Review Ann Rea Jewell Award. The Washington Post hailed the book as an “intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration.”

Fadiman’s second book, “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader” is a collection of essays on the joys of reading that she wrote while a columnist for Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress for which she was an editor-at-large from 1994 to 1998.

A graduate of Harvard, Fadiman is the editor of The American Scholar, a literary quarterly that has been published since 1932 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Under her stewardship, the magazine won the 1999 National Magazine Award for feature writing, beating out such luminaries as The New Yorker, Esquire and GQ.

Fadiman’s essays and articles have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Harvard Magazine, among others. While a staff writer for Life, she won the 1987 National Magazine Award for reporting for a story she wrote about suicide among the elderly. In 1997, Fadiman delivered the Phi Beta Kappa orations at both Harvard and Yale. She was a 1991 recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University.