Leslie Jamison: Care and Creation

This presentation covers the relationship between addiction/substances and the creative life. When struggling with a substance use disorder, there's something that's necessary about the darkness to make art. "Recovery looks a lot of different ways to a lot of different people."
Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of four books: two essay collections, Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Empathy Exams, as well as The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath, and a novel, The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award. The Empathy Exams, chosen as a Notable Book of 2014 and an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times, was named one of the Top 10 Books of 2014 by Publisher’s Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Oprah, Slate, Salon, The L Magazine, and Time Out: New York. The Recovering was named the Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Entertainment Weekly and the best-reviewed memoir of 2018 by LitHub, and was a finalist for the American Booksellers Association Book Award. Both Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Empathy Exams were finalists for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Jamison has two books currently under contract with her publisher, Little, Brown: a novel, and a memoir about single motherhood. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, including French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Swedish, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese.
Jamison is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and her essays and criticism have appeared in Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Boston Review, Bookforum, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She edited the 2017 edition of Best American Essays, and has written introductions for recent editions of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (Melville House) and the photographer Ryan Spencer’s Such Mean Estate, a collection of cinematic visions of the apocalypse (PowerHouse Books).
She has a PhD in English from Yale University, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and an AB from Harvard College. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and the Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Brooklyn with her daughter...