Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence Weschler (Cowell College, UC Santa Cruz, 1974) was for over twenty years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He recently graduated to director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, where he was director from 2001-2013. He is also the artistic director emeritus, still actively engaged, with the Chicago Humanities Festival, and was served for two years as curator for the New York Live Ideas Festival.
His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998).

His "Passions and Wonders" series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney's Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998); Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); and Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006). Mr. Wilson was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Everything that Rises received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Recent books include a considerably expanded edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, a companion volume, True to Life: Twenty Five Years of Conversation with David Hockney; and his latest collection Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative.

He is a contributing editor to McSweeney's, The Threepeeny Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review and has recently been contributing regularly to Vanity Fair, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The Believer.

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