Distinguished Writers Series March 13, 2012

Leah Hager Cohen is the author of four novels, most recently The Grief of Others, and four works of narrative nonfiction, including Train Go Sorry and Glass, Paper, Beans. She serves as the Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and on the faculty of Lesley University's low-residency M.F.A. in Creative Writing. After years of swearing she would never write criticism, she has also become a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.Jim Shepard is the author of six novels, including most recently Project X, and four story collections, including most recently Like You'd Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize, and You Think That?s Bad, released this last April. Project X won the 2005 Library of Congress/Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, as well as the ALEX Award from the American Library Association. His short fiction has appeared in, among other magazines, Harper's, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Tin House, the New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Playboy, and he was a columnist on film for the magazine The Believer. Four of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He's won an Artists' Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Williams College.