Field-Of-Study: General Nonfiction

Joy Harjo began writing poetry as a voice for indigenous-rights movements as a university student in Southwest in the seventies.  She came to poetry through her mother’s songwriting, and was later inspired by the lyrical activism of the poets and songwriters Pablo Neruda, Okot b’Pitek, Adrienne Rich, Bob Dylan, Gil Scott-Heron, and Leslie Silko, among

Rachel Cohen is an essayist and cultural critic, who writes about history, literature, and the arts.  Her essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Guardian, London Review of Books, New York Times, Threepenny Review, Believer, and McSweeney’s, and have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology and in Best American Essays.  Cohen’s first book, A

Dr. Sweet is an Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a prize-winning historian with a Ph.D. in medical history.  She practiced medicine for twenty years at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco, where she began writing. In God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the

"I boarded those third class trains to enlightenment, and befriended the fragile heroes of this book,” Francesco Clemente wrote of A Blue Hand. “Deborah Baker’s narrative is concise, rich, unsentimental and shows how, just like India, a spiritual journey is grotesque, sublime, comical, but never sad." Of The Convert, Michelle Goldberg wrote in Tablet, “[Baker

Susan Orlean has examined subcultures, passions, and the textures of ordinary life through narrative stories so engaging that the Washington Post has described it as “a national treasure.”   Her essays have appeared in the New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1992, as well as in Esquire, Smithsonian, New York Times Magazine,

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (2011), a study of grief in America, and the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for both the Forward First Book Prize and the Patterson Poetry Prize. She has been an editor at the New Yorker, culture editor and

D.T. Max is a graduate of Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. His first book was The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery. The book was at once a piece of science journalism and a point of entry to explore what it means to be sick in a well world.

I always thought autobiography was my strength because I learned, as a young poet, how failure to discover the origin of things was ok if you tried.  Failure—and its traditions, for instance the Blues—could be sustainable, especially if I could uncover some vestige of my origins in the process.  Even when I began as a

Carlin Romano, Critic-at-Large of The Chronicle of Higher Education and Literary Critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer for twenty-five years (1984–2009), is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Ursinus College. A former President of The National Book Critics Circle, Romano is the author of America the Philosophical (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), a 672-page study of philosophy

Yunte Huang grew up in a small town in southeastern China, where at the age of eleven he began to learn English by secretly listening to Voice of America programs on a battered transistor radio. After receiving his B.A. in English from Peking University, Huang came to the United States in 1991, landing in Tuscaloosa,

Professor Nasar is the first James S. and John L. Knight Professor of Business Journalism and codirects the M.A. program in business journalism with James B. Stewart, Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism. Professor Nasar is the author of the bestselling biography A Beautiful Mind, which has been published in thirty languages, including Farsi, Turkish, Russian