Suzannah Lessard

Suzannah Lessard is an American writer of literary non-fiction. She has written memoir, reportorial pieces, essays, and opinion.

Life

She has taught at Columbia School of the Arts, Wesleyan University, The New School, George Mason University, George Washington University, and Goucher College MFA in Creative Non-fiction.

She was one of the first editors of the Washington Monthly from 1971 to 1974. From 1975 to 1995 she was a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine She has also published in New York Times Magazine, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, and Wilson Quarterly and Harvard Design.

Awards and honors

• 1995 Whiting Award
• 2003 Mark Lynton History Prize, Mapping the New World: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Sprawl

Fellowships

• 2001-2002 Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C.
• 2002-2003 Jenny McKean Moore Fellowship for creative non-fiction, at George Washington University

Works

She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (1996). Her next book, Dreamscape: Finding Our Way in a Time of Epochal Change was, as of fall 2011, in editorial process. It is a reportorial essay about the experience of going from the Industrial Age to the Information Age with changes in the form and meaning of landscape and place as the point of entry.

Her next book, The View From a Small Mountain: Reading the American Landscape will be published in 2017 by Random House.

Anthologies

• Elaine Greene, ed. (2006). "The Luxury of Order". If These Walls Could Talk: Thoughts of Home. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc. ISBN 978-1-58816-611-1.

Reviews

This is a book about -- to put it in the simplest terms possible -- the connections between art, specifically architecture, and life. Is there meaning in architecture that comes inherently from its physical form? Or does meaning come from our own experience? Suzannah Lessard never addresses these questions directly, but they hover over every page of this extraordinary memoir, and searching for an answer to them, as much as telling the story of her family's history, is this book's reason for being.