 |
Melanie Thernstrom | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | June 30, 1964 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Harvard University Cornell University (MFA) |
| Occupations |
|
| Children | 2 |
| Parent(s) | Stephan Thernstrom Abigail Thernstrom |
Melanie Thernstrom (born June 30, 1964) is an American author and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine who frequently writes about murders and crime.
Thernstrom attended Harvard University, where she graduated with highest honors in English. [1] She received an MFA in creative writing at Cornell and taught creative writing at Cornell, Harvard, and in the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine.
Thernstrom's senior thesis was entitled Mistakes of Metaphor, an account of the mysterious disappearance and murder of her best friend, Bibi Lee, three years earlier, for which Lee’s boyfriend was eventually convicted on the basis of a confession which he recanted. Thernstrom's poetry professor showed the thesis to literary agents, and she soon received an advance of $367,000. The Dead Girl, which was published by Pocket Books in 1990, was praised by literary critics such as Harold Bloom, Harold Brodkey and Helen Vendler as reimagining the true crime genre with its use of literary theory and reflections on memory and metaphor. [2]
Thernstrom's second book, Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder, was about Sinedu Tadesse, a Harvard junior from Ethiopia who murdered her Vietnamese roommate and then committed suicide while living at Dunster House in 1995. In contrast to The Dead Girl, Halfway Heaven explores murder from the point of view of the murderer. Thernstrom had met Tadesse while teaching an autobiographical writing course at Harvard. After her death, Thernstrom reported on it for The New Yorker , [3] traveling to Ethiopia and obtaining access to Tadesse's diaries which described her struggles against growing mental illness and her failed attempts to get help from the University. Halfway Heaven was praised by Mikal Gilmore and Elaine Showalter. [4]
In 1999, Thernstrom wrote a lengthy Vanity Fair article on murdered college student Matthew Shepard. [5] Her pieces in the New York Times Magazine have included ones on the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, [6] narrative medicine, [7] physical pain, [8] [9] high-end matchmakers, [10] divorce, [11] fugitives, [12] and a personal essay on losing an art inheritance. [13] Her work has also appeared in New York magazine, [14] The Wall Street Journal , Food & Wine , [15] [16] Travel + Leisure , Elle , and other publications. Her food essays have appeared in Best American Food Writing 2001 and 2004.
Thernstrom is the daughter of Abigail Thernstrom, who was a prominent political scientist, and Stephan Thernstrom, the Winthrop Professor of American History Emeritus at Harvard. She lives with her husband and two children in Palo Alto, California. [17]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
Julie Pottinger, better known by her pen name, Julia Quinn, is an American author of historical romance fiction. Her novels have been translated into 41 languages and have appeared on The New York Times Bestseller List 19 times. She has been inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. Her Bridgerton series of novels has been adapted for Netflix by Shondaland under the title Bridgerton.
Gish Jen is a contemporary American writer and speaker.
Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other non-fiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
Lisa Randall is an American theoretical physicist and Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. Her research includes the fundamental forces of nature and dimensions of space. She studies the Standard Model, supersymmetry, possible solutions to the hierarchy problem concerning the relative weakness of gravity, cosmology of dimensions, baryogenesis, cosmological inflation, and dark matter. She contributed to the Randall–Sundrum model, first published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum.
Jay Anthony Lukas was an American journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families: one upper-middle-class white, one working-class white, and one working-class African-American. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes.
Alice Hoffman is an American novelist and young-adult and children's writer, best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic, which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name. Many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships.
Dunster House is one of twelve undergraduate residential houses at Harvard University. Built in 1930, it is one of the first two dormitories at Harvard University constructed under President Abbott Lawrence Lowell's House Plan and one of the seven Houses given to Harvard by Edward Harkness. In the early days, room rents varied based on the floor and the size of the room. Dunster was unique among Harvard dormitories for its sixth-story walk-up ; these rooms were originally rented by poorer students, such as Norman Mailer.
Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".
Gourmet magazine was a monthly publication of Condé Nast and the first U.S. magazine devoted to food and wine. The New York Times noted that "Gourmet was to food what Vogue is to fashion." Founded by Earle R. MacAusland (1890–1980), Gourmet, first published in January 1941, also covered "good living" on a wider scale, and grew to incorporate culture, travel, and politics into its food coverage. James Oseland, an author and editor in chief of rival food magazine Saveur, called Gourmet "an American cultural icon."
On May 28, 1995, Sinedu Tadesse, a junior at Harvard College, stabbed her roommate, Trang Phuong Ho, to death, then committed suicide. The incident may have resulted in changes to living conditions at Harvard.
Helen Vendler was an American academic, writer and literary critic. She was a professor of English language and history at Boston University, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities. Her academic focus was critical analysis of poetry and she studied poets from Shakespeare and George Herbert to modern poets such as Wallace Stevens and Seamus Heaney. Her technique was close reading, which she described as "reading from the point of view of a writer".
Robert Benjamin Silvers was an American editor who served as editor of The New York Review of Books from 1963 to 2017.
Food & Wine is an American monthly magazine published by Dotdash Meredith. It was founded in 1978 by Ariane and Michael Batterberry. It features recipes, cooking tips, travel information, restaurant reviews, chefs, wine pairings and seasonal/holiday content and has been credited by The New York Times with introducing the dining public to "Perrier, the purple Peruvian potato and Patagonian toothfish".
Linda Alouise Gregg was an American poet.
The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the Truman Capote Literary Trust. The value of the award is $30,000 (USD), and is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language. The formal name of the prize is the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, commemorating both Capote and his friend Newton Arvin, who was a distinguished critic and Smith College professor until he lost his job in 1960 after his homosexuality was publicly exposed.
Abigail Thernstrom was an American political scientist and a leading conservative scholar on race relations, voting rights and education. She was an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and vice chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1975. According to the New York Times, she and her husband Harvard Professor Stephan Thernstrom, "are much in demand on the conservative talk-show circuit, where they forcefully argue that racial preferences are wrong, divisive, and as a tool to help minorities overrated." They serve on the boards of conservative and libertarian public-policy institutes."
Janis Spindel is a matchmaker, author, and entrepreneur. According to her website, she created the matchmaking service after matching fourteen couples who married within one year. Before entering the matchmaking field, she owned nine retail locations of "Mommy and Me". Spindel has been involved with several charities. Spindel is also a former fashion executive.
Katy Butler is an American journalist, essayist and author of Knocking on Heaven's Door, the Path to a Better Way of Death, and The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life.
Alligator Juniper is a national literary magazine published annually by Prescott College. The journal was founded by Melanie Bishop in 1995. Publication is funded by the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize culinary professionals in the United States. The awards recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists each year, and are generally scheduled around James Beard's May birthday.
