Brenda Wineapple

Nonfiction writer, essayist, and literary critic; Professor at Columbia University and The New School. Brenda Wineapple's acclaimed new book, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (Harper), combines political cultural history to tell the complex story of how America faced the crime of slavery.  Her other prize-winning books include White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life, winner of the Ambassador Award.  She also edited The Selected Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier for the Library of America's Poets Series, and the anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Writers and Writing.  Her essays and reviews frequently appear in such national publications as The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and The Threepenny Review.  She is on the editorial boards of The American Scholar, Lapham's Quarterly, and on the literary advisory board of the Guggenheim Foundation. Wineapple was awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2005 National Book Award. She was named Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2009-2011). Currently,