Award-Winning Author Andrew Solomon to Give Talk at Holy Cross
Andrew Solomon, award-winning author, will give a reading as part of the Working Writers Series on Thursday, April 4 at 7:30 p.m. in Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross. The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program and the W.H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College, is free and open to the public.
Solomon is a writer and lecturer on psychology, politics, and the arts. His most recent book, “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,” published by Scribner last November, tells the stories of families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who were conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. President Bill Clinton said of the book, “In ‘Far from the Tree,’ Andrew Solomon reminds us that nothing is more powerful in a child’s development than the love of a parent. This remarkable new book introduces us to mothers and fathers across America–many in circumstances the rest of us can hardly imagine—who are making their children feel special, no matter what challenges come their way.”
Solomon’s earlier books include “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression” (Scribner, 2001), which won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize; “The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost” (Knopf, 1991); and “A Stone Boat” (Plume, 1996), a national bestselling novel which tells the story of a man’s shifting identity as he watches his mother battle cancer, and which was a runner up for the L.A. Times First Fiction prize.
He has written for New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, and his work has been featured on National Public Radio’s “Moth Radio Hour,” NBC’s “TODAY” and “Rock Center with Brian Williams,” and “Charlie Rose” on PBS.