Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison won the 2014 Graywolf nonfiction prize for her essay collection The Empathy Exams (Graywolf Press, 2014), which debuted at #11 on the New York Times Bestseller list. She is also the author of a novel, The Gin Closet (The Free Press, 2010), and her work has appeared in Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, New York Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and The New Republic. She’s a columnist for the New York Times Book Review and is currently finishing a doctoral dissertation at Yale about addiction narratives. She was born in Washington, D.C., grew up in Los Angeles, and has lived in Iowa, Nicaragua, New Haven, and New York. Leslie says, “I've worked as a baker, an office temp, an innkeeper, a tutor, and a medical actor. Every one of these was a world; they're still in me.”