Anne Fadiman: Biography
Anne Fadiman is the editor of The American Scholar, a literary quarterly that has been published since 1932 by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her journal received this year's National Magazine Award for the best American magazine with a circulation under 100,000.
Fadiman is the author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the Salon Book Award for nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for current interest nonfiction, and the Boston Book Review Ann Rea Jewell Award for nonfiction. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down tells the story of a refugee family from Laos and its tragic encounters with the American medical system. The Washington Post called it "an intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration."
Fadiman's second book, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), is a collection of essays about her lifelong love affair with books and language. The essays were adapted from her "Common Reader" column in Civilization, the magazine of the Library of Congress, of which she was Editor-at-large from 1994 to 1998. The London Observer called Ex Libris "witty, enchanting, and supremely well-written." Salon readers voted it #2 on their list of the Ten Best Nonfiction Books of 1998. It has been or will be translated into eleven languages, including Chinese and Catalan.
Fadiman's essays and articles have appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among other publications. While she was a staff writer at Life, she won a National Magazine Award for Reporting for her reportage on suicide among the elderly.
In 1997, Fadiman delivered the Phi Beta Kappa orations at both Harvard (of which she is a 1975 graduate) and Yale. She was a 1991-92 recipient of a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford.
Fadiman lives with her husband and two children in western Massachusetts, where she teaches nonfiction writing at Smith College.
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