Katha Pollitt, author and columnist at The Nation, will open Hamilton College's new "Writers on Writing" series on Tuesday, Oct. 25, at 7:30 p.m., in the Red Pit, Kirner-Johnson. Her lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled "Writing Memoir: A Reading With Comment." The series is sponsored by the Writing Program.
At The Nation columnist Pollitt is well known for her sharp and provocative analyses of popular culture and politics. Her "Subject to Debate" column, which was called "the best place to go for original thinking on the left" by The Washington Post, began in January 1994 and appears every other week in The Nation; it is frequently reprinted in newspapers across the country.
Pollitt has been contributing to The Nation since 1980. Her 1992 essay on the culture wars, "Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me…" won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism.
For her poetry Pollitt has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her 1982 book Antarctic Traveller won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Grant Street, Yale Review, Poetry and Antaeus.
Pollitt has also written essays for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Harpers and The New York Times. She has appeared on NPR's Fresh Air and All Things Considered, Charlie Rose and CNN.
A collection of her writings, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, was published by Knopf in 1994, and in 2001 Random House published Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics and Culture. Pollitt was educated at Harvard and the Columbia School of the Arts and has taught poetry at Barnard College and the 92nd Street Y.
