Anne Fadiman, author of the best-seller Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, will speak at Cleveland Public Library’s Writers and Readers Series on Sunday, May 4, 2:00 p.m. Free and open to the public, the event will take place at the Main Library, Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium, E. 6^th Street and Superior Avenue.

A native of New York City, Fadiman was born to literary, radio and television personality Clifton Fadiman and World War II correspondent and author Annalee Jacoby Fadiman. She attended Harvard and graduated from Radcliffe College.

Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (1997) continues to be used at universities in writing classes as both an example of literary journalism and as a casebook for cultural sensitivity. Her best-selling Ex-Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) is a widely-read collection of her essays about books and reading gleaned from the Library of Congress magazine, Civilization, where she was one of the founding editors.

From 1998 to 2004, Fadiman was the editor of The American Scholar, the quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by Phi Beta Kappa. A winner of two National Magazine Awards for her reporting and her essays, Fadiman’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The New Yorker and numerous other periodicals. Her latest book, a collection of essays from The American Scholar, is at Large and at Small: Familiar Essays (2007).

Fadiman is currently the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale University. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, the writer George Howe Colt, and their two children. For more information, visit www.cpl.org or call (216) 623-2800.