Quindlen's appearance is sponsored by the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture at Hamilton College and the Hamilton College English department. It is part of the Kirkland Project's on-going series, The Battle Against Breast Cancer: Who's in Charge?
A columnist at The New York Times from 1981 to 1994, Quindlen in 1990 became only the third woman in the paper's history to write a regular column for its influential Op-Ed page when she began the nationally syndicated "Public and Private." A collection of those columns, Thinking Out Loud, was published by Random House in 1993 and was on the The New York Times best seller list for more than three months.
Quindlen has written three best-selling novels, Object Lessons (1991), One True Thing (1994) and Black and and Blue (1998). One True Thing has been made into a Universal feature film starring Meryl Streep and is currently in theaters. Black and Blue went on The New York Times Best Seller List the week of its publication date and has been on ever since; it has also been chosen for Oprah's (Winfrey) Book Club, has made it to number one on the Publishers Weekly best selling book list, and is being optioned for a feature film.
She is also the author of a collection of essays, Living Out Loud (1988) and two children's books, The Tree That Came to Stay (1992) and Happily Ever After (1997).
In 1992 Quindlen won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. She holds honorary doctorates from Dartmouth College, Denison University, Moravian College and Smith College, and was awarded the University Medal of Excellence by Columbia. She was a Poynter Fellow in journalism at Yale, and a Victoria Fellow in contemporary issues at Rutgers. In 1996 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Quindlen is a graduate of Barnard College and serves on Barnard's board of trustees. She is also on the council of the Author's Guild, the board of St. Luke's School, a member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Board of Advocates, and the board of NARAL Foundation. In 1995 Quindlen left the world of newspapers to become a full-time novelist. She is currently at work on two new novels.
