Anne Fadiman Joins Yale-in-London Faculty for 2023 Sessions

This term we are delighted to announce that acclaimed essayist and reporter Anne Fadiman joins us to teach our Yale-in-London 2023 cohort of students.

Our Yale-in-London programme allows Yale and Yale-NUS College undergraduates a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live and learn at the Paul Mellon Centre in London.

Anne is teaching the course ‘Write About London’ for Yale in London Summer 2023 Session One. The course invites students to explore the city in four ways: reading about London, in a variety of genres; writing about London, with an emphasis on craft; visiting London sites; and getting to know one Londoner with an interesting occupation.

Anne’s most recent book, The Wine Lover’s Daughter, is a memoir about her father, wine and the upsides and downsides of upward mobility. She has also written The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, an account of the cross-cultural conflicts between a Hmong family and the American medical system, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Another of her most notable works is Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, a book about books (buying them, writing in their margins and arguing with her husband on how to shelve them). At Large and at Small is a collection of essays on Coleridge, postal history and ice cream, among other topics; it was the source of an encrypted quotation in the New York Times Sunday acrostic. Fadiman is the only writer to have won National Magazine Awards for both reporting (on elderly suicide) and essays (on the multiple and often contradictory meanings of the American flag).

She worked with the family of her former student Marina Keegan to edit The Opposite of Loneliness, a posthumous collection of Marina’s work. She has also edited a literary quarterly (the American Scholar) and two essay anthologies. As Francis Writer in Residence, Fadiman teaches non-fiction writing and serves as a mentor to students who are considering careers in writing or editing. In 2012 she received the Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence; in 2015 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.