When: 
Thursday, February 4, 2016 - 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Where: 
Kirby 104
Price: 
Free

"Jamison stitches together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon." —NPR

 Leslie Jamison is an extraordinarily gifted writer whose work explores the strengths and limits of our shared humanity with great insight and compassion.  Her writing has been called at once “profound” and ”intellectual” and then “poetic” and “philosophical.” She’s often compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, the inheritor of a great American literary tradition.

Her most recent book, a collection of essays called The Empathy Exams, won the 2012 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s a book about medical acting, ultra-runners, prison, parasites, silver mines, gang tours, and—beyond and beneath all else—the possibilities, texture, and limits of compassion. The Empathy Exams was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. In their review The Boston Globe called the book “a brilliant collection” and The Huffington Post declared that Leslie “seems poised for greatness; don’t miss out.”

The Gin Closet, Leslie’s first book was a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum First Fiction Award and one of The San Francisco Chronicle’s best books of the year. Booklist called the novel “hauntingly beautiful.” Leslie’s articles, essays and fiction have appeared in many publications including Harper’s, The Believer, Oxford American, Tin House, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Leslie is currently finishing her PhD at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on addiction narratives. She has taught courses in fiction and nonfiction at Wesleyan University, Yale University and the New York University School of Journalism. She also mentors through the PEN Prison Writing Program and has worked—for various stints, in various points—as a baker, an office temp, a barista, a medical actor and an innkeeper. 

Leslie was born in Washington, DC and raised in Los Angeles. Her aunt is the renowned psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison. She lives with her husband, the novelist Charles Bock, and their daughter in Brooklyn.

Sponsored by: 
Friends of Skillman Library

Contact information

Name: 
Neil J. McElroy
Phone: 
610-330-5150
Email: 
mcelroyn@lafayette.edu