Lowell Lecture

Leslie Jamison: The Empathy Exams

Date & Time

March 2, 2016 at 7 p.m. - 9 p.m.

Location

Boston College - Gasson 100
140 Commonwealth Avenue Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Driving Directions

Speaker(s)

Leslie Jamison

Presenting Organization

Boston College

Topics

Current Affairs Humanities

Contact

James Smith (smithbt@bc.edu, 617-552-2203)

Leslie Jamison’s most recent book, a collection of essays called The Empathy Exams, won the 2012 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s a book about medical acting, ultra-runners, prison, parasites, silver mines, gang tours, and—beyond and beneath all else—the possibilities, texture, and limits of compassion. The Empathy Exams was named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Leslie is currently finishing her PhD at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on addiction narratives. She has taught courses in fiction and nonfiction at Wesleyan University, Yale University and the New York University School of Journalism. She also mentors through the PEN Prison Writing Program and has worked—for various stints, in various points—as a baker, an office temp, a barista, a medical actor and an innkeeper. She lives with her husband, the novelist Charles Bock, and their daughter in Brooklyn.