Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Rescheduled! - April 5: Annie Murphy Paul and Carl Zimmer

Annie Murphy Paul's most recent book is Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of our Lives. A magazine journalist and book author who writes about the biological and social sciences, she was born in Philadelphia, and graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. A former senior editor at Psychology Today magazine, she was awarded the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Slate, Discover, Health, O: The Oprah Magazine, and many other publications. She is the author of The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves. An article based on Origins was included in the Best American Science Writing 2009.

Carl Zimmer writes about science regularly for the New York Times and magazines such as Discover, where he is a contributing editor and columnist. He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction To Evolution. Carl's books have won a number of accolades, including "One of the Top 100 Books of 2004" by The New York Times Book Review. His articles have been published in the New York Times, as well as magazines including National Geographic, Time, Scientific American,Science, and Popular Science.

From 1994 to 1998 Carl was a senior editor at Discover, where he remains a contributing editor and writes a monthly column about the brain. He is now a lecturer at Yale University, where he teaches writing about science and the environment. He is also the first Visiting Scholar at the Science, Health, and Environment Reporting Program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Carl also hosts "Meet the Scientist," a podcast from the American Society for Microbiology.

Carl's work has been anthologized in both Best American Science Writing and Best American Science and Nature Writing. He has won fellowships and a number of awards, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Journalism Award twice, for his work for The New York Times and for his blog, The Loom. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

April 26: Eleanor Lerman and Gail Mazur

Eleanor Lerman's most recent collection of poems, The Sensual World Re-Emerges was published by Sarabande Press in 2010. It has been nominated for three awards: ForeWord's Book of the Year (poetry), The Audre Lorde Poetry Award from the Publishing Triangle and the Lambda Literary Award (poetry). Her collection of short stories, The Blonde on the Train (Mayapple Press), came out in 2009.

Eleanor's first book of poetry, Armed Love (Wesleyan University Press), was published in 1973 when she was twenty-one and was nominated for a National Book Award. While Eleanor quickly became known as an exciting young poet with a direct, new voice, she also faced criticism for her explicit depiction of then-shocking subject matter. One more collection, Come the Sweet By and By followed in 1975, and then, partly in response to the backlash against her first book, she did not write another book of poems until 2001, when The Mystery of Meteors. This was followed by Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds (2005), which was awarded the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the year's most outstanding book of poetry.

Raised in the Bronx and Far Rockaway, Eleanor has lived in New York City all her life.

Gail Mazur’s poems celebrate the din and detail of ordinary life. Her most recent volume, Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems, won the Massachusetts Book Award and her 2001 volume They Can’t Take That Away from Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. Gail published her first collection, Nightfire in 1978 and followed that with The Pose of Happiness (1986).

A graduate of Smith College, Gail has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Active in the Boston and Cambridge literary communities, she has served as the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center, and as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College.