Susan Orlean Welcomed as 2011 Steven Fisher Writer in Residence

Announcing the 2011 Steven Fisher Writer in Residence

SUSAN ORLEAN

Thursday, September 23
7:30 pm
Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library
 
In addition to her public reading, Ms. Orlean will meet with graduate and undergraduate students during her residency, and conduct one-on-one conferences with our MFA candidates to discuss their work in creative nonfiction.
 

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Renowned American Journalist, Susan Orlean, has authored seven books, including The Orchid Thief, which inspired Charlie Kaufman’s script for the movie Adaptation. Other major works include the essay collections, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup and My Kind of Place, as well as a children’s book, Lazy Little Loafers,  and Throw Me a Bone, a canine cookbook collaboration between Orlean, cookbook author Sally Sampson, and Cooper Gillespie, Orlean’s beloved Welsh springer spaniel.

Since 1992, Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, to which she has contributed countless articles on everything from homing pigeons to mall art to the World Championships of Taxidermy. Her work has also appeared in such places the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe,as well as Vogue, Esquire, Outside and Rolling Stone. About her writing career, Orlean has said that she set out to be the kind of writer “who wrote long stories about interesting things, rather than news stories about short-lived events.” Her body of work “drolly but affectionately considers ‘softer subjects’ than some of those covered by her colleagues.” In 1992, Orlean was awarded the Nieman Fellowship, an award given to mid-career journalists by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She lives in New York City.

This residency is sponsored by Steven Fisher, the Department of English and the College of the Liberal Arts.