Barnard College

Anna Marie Quindlen is an American author, journalist, and opinion columnist whose New York Times column, Public and Private, won the Pulitzer Prize... for Commentary in 1992. She began her journalism career in 1974 as a reporter for the New York Post. Between 1977 and 1994 she held several posts at The New York Times. Quindlen left journalism in 1995 to become a full-time novelist. In 1999, she joined Newsweek, writing a bi-weekly column until announcing her semi-retirement in the May 18, 2009 issue of the magazine. Quindlen is known as a critic of what she perceives to be the fast-paced and increasingly materialistic nature of modern American life. Much of her personal writing centers on her mother who died at the age of 40 from ovarian cancer, when Quindlen was 19 years old. She has written five best-selling novels, three of which have been made into movies. One True Thing was made into a feature film in 1998 for which Meryl Streep received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Black and Blue and Blessings were made into television movies in 1999 and 2003 respectively.
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Jhumpa Lahiri is a Indian American author. Lahiri's debut short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,... and her first novel, The Namesake , was adapted into the popular film of the same name. She was born Nilanjana Sudeshna, which she says are both "good names", but goes by her nickname Jhumpa. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by U.S. President Barack Obama. Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Indian immigrants from the state of West Bengal. Her family moved to the United States when she was three; Lahiri considers herself an American, stating, "I wasn't born here, but I might as well have been." Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father Amar Lahiri works as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island; he is the basis for the protagonist in "The Third and Final Continent," the closing story from Interpreter of Maladies. Lahiri's mother wanted her children to grow up knowing their Bengali heritage, and her family often visited relatives in Calcutta .
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Vivian Sobchack is an American cinema and media theorist and cultural critic. Sobchack's work on science fiction films and phenomenology of film is... perhaps her most recognized. She is a prolific writer however, and has authored numerous books and articles across a diverse range of subjects; from historiography to film noir to work on documentary film, new media, and film feminism. Her work has been featured in such publications as Film Comment and Camera Obscura and she is the author and editor of many books on film and media. Sobchack was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940. Her early life was spent on Long Island until she moved to Manhattan to attend Barnard College. While at Barnard, Sobchack often frequented the nearby legendary Thalia Theater, which offered up a diverse schedule of classic and foreign films. She received her degree in English Literature in 1961 with aspirations to write fiction. She published some poetry and began work on a novel, but within two years of graduating moved into a career counseling college grads in search of their first jobs.
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Marisha Pessl is an American writer best known for her debut novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Pessl was born in Clarkston, Michigan, to... Klaus, an Austrian engineer for General Motors, and Anne, an American homemaker. Pessl's parents divorced when she was three, and she moved to Asheville, North Carolina with her mother and sister. Pessl had an intellectually stimulating upbringing, recalling that her mother read "a fair chunk of the Western canon out loud" to her and her sister before bed, and entered her in lessons for riding, painting, jazz, and French. Pessl started high school at the Asheville School, a private, co-educational boarding school, but graduated from Asheville High School in 1995. She attended Northwestern University for two years before transferring to Barnard College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English Literature. After graduating, she worked as a financial consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, while writing in her free time. After two failed attempts at novels, Pessl began writing a third in 2001 about the relationship between a daughter and her controlling, charismatic father.
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