Lawrence Weschler

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Lawrence Weschler

Born	1952
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	United States
Writing period	1981 - present
Genres	Creative nonfiction

Lawrence Weschler (born 1952) is an author of works of creative nonfiction.

A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz (1974), Weschler was for over twenty years (1981 - 2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Awards—for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992—and was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award (1998). Beginning in 1999, his "Convergences" essays appeared regularly in McSweeney's Quarterly; a collection of these essays, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, was published in 2006 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Since 2001, Weschler has been the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. He taught throughout the 1990s at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

In 2003, Weschler organized and edited a pilot issue of Omnivore, a prospective periodical described by Steven Heller as a "biannual (but hoping to be quarterly) magazine of writing and visual culture from The New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University."^[1] As of 2007, no subsequent issues of Omnivore have been published.

In February 2006, Weschler took on the position of artistic director for the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Weschler is the grandson of the composer Ernst Toch and the brother of the women's-health author Toni Weschler.

With his work Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Weschler was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

[edit] Bibliography

Solidarity: Poland in the Season of Its Passion (1982)
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982)
The Passion of Poland: From Solidarity through the State of War (1984)
A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990)
Shapinsky’s Karma, Boggs’s Bills, and Other True-life Tales (1990)
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (1995)
A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998)
Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998)
Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999)
Vermeer in Bosnia (2004)
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006)