Writers at Work: Living as Readers

RSVP is required. You can register for this event here.

Please join us for our new lecture series hosted by the Creative Writing Faculty in the Harvard English Department inviting writers to discuss their work.

Featuring Rachel Cohen and Katharine Smyth and moderated by Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature.

Rachel Cohen is the author of Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels (New York Times Editors' Choice), Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, and A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of Writers and Artists, (winner of PEN / Jerard Fund Award). Her essays on artists and writers – their friendships, fallings out, and the work they make – have appeared in publications including the New Yorker, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Art in America, Literary Hub, Apollo Magazine, McSweeney’s and Best American Essays. Cohen is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she is Professor of Practice in the Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. She keeps a public notebook on looking at art at https://rachelecohen.com/

Katharine Smyth is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She has worked at The Paris Review and taught at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in nonfiction. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Elle, The Paris Review, Literary Hub, The Point, DuJour, Poets & Writers, and Domino, among other publications. Her first book, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf, was published by Crown in 2019 and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.