Award-Winning Author and Holy Cross Prof. to Give a Reading as Part of Working Writers Series

Leila Philip, associate professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross and award-winning author, will give a reading as part of the Working Writers Series on Thursday, Sept. 20 at 7:30 p.m. in the Levis Browsing Room at the College. The event, sponsored by the College’s Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public.

Philip is the author of four books: “The Road Through Miyama” (Random House,1989, Vintage, 1991), “Hidden Dialogue: A Discussion Between Women in Japan and the United States” (Japan Society Public Affairs Publishing Program, 1992), “A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family” (Viking, 2001, Penguin, 2002), which was republished in 2009 as a SUNY Excelsior Edition, and a forthcoming collection of lyric essays, “Water Under the Bridge” (Argian Press, 2013).

“A Family Place,” which examines the complex history of her ancestral Hudson Valley farm, is Philip’s celebrated memoir that has been called “an unpretentious, subtly shaded story of the importance of understanding the ghosts and heroes that reside in every ancestral home” by the New York Times and “mesmerizing” by Publishers Weekly. 

Philip, who earned her M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University and a B.A. from Princeton,  is the recipient of the 1990 PEN/Martha Albrand Citation for Nonfiction, the Willa Cather Literary Award for Memoir and Essay, the Victorian Society Publication Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Association of University Women and Radcliffe Research and Study Center.

Philip lives in Woodstock, Conn. with her husband and son. A member of the Holy Cross faculty since 2003, she is also a distinguished visiting writer in the low residency M.F.A programs at Fairfield University and Ashland University. Fluent in Japanese, her work has been anthologized in numerous books including “Creating Nonfiction” (St. Martin’s Press, 2008), “Japan: True Stories of Life on the Road” (Traveler’s Tale Books, 1999), “Writing Down the River” (Northland Press, 1997).