Anne Fadiman

Leading non-fiction writer and writing teacher. National Book Critics Circle Award winner for her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997), an account of a Hmong refugee family in California and their crosscultural conflicts with the doctors caring for their epileptic child. Two collections of essays have followed, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007), as well as an edited volume, Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005). Founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilization, and editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's The American Scholar. During her six-year tenure, the journal earned three National Magazine Awards and was nominated for nine others. Fadiman currently  teaches nonfiction writing as the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale, where she has received the Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence.