Anne Fadiman

visiting writer for 2008, won a National Book Critics’ Circle Award for her first book, “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down,” about an epileptic Hmong child and her family in Merced, Calif. “Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader,” her best-selling book, is a collection of essays originally published in the Library of Congress’s Civilization magazine, of which Fadiman served as a founding editor. She also served as the long-time editor of “The American Scholar.”

Fadiman is the first Francis Writer in Residence, Yale University’s chair in nonfiction writing. She serves as an English professor and a mentor to students considering careers in writing or editing.

Fadiman’s work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker and The New York Times, among many other publications. She has won National Magazine Awards for reporting and essays. Anne Fadiman was the editor of the 2003 edition of “Best American Essays and Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love.” Her latest essay collection, “At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays,” came out in 2007.