Bonnie Friedman
Who: Bonnie Friedman
When: Thursday, September 12, 7 pm
Where: Salon, Private Residence, RSVP 214-838-3554, wordspace@wordspace.us
Bonnie Friedman was born in the Bronx, New York, and to her amazement was accepted into the Bronx High School of Science despite the fact that math made her weep and the only thing she liked about biology was spelling agar agar.
She continued her studies at Wesleyan University, where she majored in Third World Politics, and the University of Iowa, where she earned an MFA in fiction writing. She has won fellowships to both MacDowell and The Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown, and was awarded a 2013-2014 fellowship by the Institute for the Advancement of the Arts at the University of North Texas
Her first book, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life (HarperCollins) was a Village Voice bestseller and is widely anthologized.
Her next book, The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy(Beacon) was called “eloquent” by Library Journal, “excellent,” by Publisher’s Weekly, and “compulsively readable” by O., the Oprah Magazine.
Her writing has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Movie Writing, The Best Writing on Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best of The Oprah Magazine. She has published frequently in the New York Times, and her work has appeared inO., the Oprah Magazine, Redbook, Self, and The Ladies Home Journal, as well as many literary journals. Her very first short story was published in Playgirl magazine (a mixed blessing), and she’s been accepted to be a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and at the MacDowell Colony.
Most recently, her essay “Becoming Visible” was selected by Kathryn Harrison for a special memoir issue of Ploughshares. She has been the keynote speaker at many writing conferences, as well as at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.
She has taught writing at Dartmouth College and at NYU, and is currently an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of North Texas. She divides her time between Brooklyn and Denton.
She is not the same Bonnie Friedman who writes travel guides to Hawaii, much as she wishes she were!
