Thursday, September 15th at 11 am. Performance Center, GUC.
 

JEFF SHARLET

Jeff Sharlet is the nationally bestselling author of THE FAMILY (2008), which spent 26 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction lists. Barbara Ehrenreich declared it “one of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposes you’ll ever read.” His newest book is SWEET HEAVEN WHEN I DIE (2011). “The book belongs in the tradition of long-form, narrative nonfiction best exemplified by Joan Didion, John McPhee [and] Norman Mailer,” says the Washington Post. “Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters.” Excerpts in Harper’s Magazine from Sharlet’s 2010 book, C STREET -- described by the Washington Post as “brilliant, even courageous” -- earned him the Molly Ivins Prize, the Thomas Jefferson Award, and the Outspoken Award. His proudest achievement is being named one of the stupidest journalists in America by Ann Coulter.

Sharlet is Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth and a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and Rolling Stone. In 2000, Sharlet teamed up with novelist Peter Manseau to create KillingTheBuddha.com, which has since become an award-winning online literary magazine about religion, culture, and politics. Sharlet and Manseau spent a year on the road together investigating the varieties of religious experience in America—a cowboy church in Texas, witches in Kansas, a Pentecostal exorcism for a terrorist in North Carolina, an electric chair gospel choir in Florida. Publishers Weekly described the book that resulted, KILLING THE BUDDHA (2004), as “the most original and insightful spiritual writing to come out of America since Jack Kerouac first hit the road.” In 2009, Sharlet and Manseau collected the best of Killing the Buddha, the magazine into BELIEVER, BEWARE, which Pop Matters described as a book of “cumulative power… it’s easy to imagine these essays as a film by Errol Morris, or as episodes of This American Life.”

From 2003 to 2009, Sharlet was a research scholar at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media. He has spoken at universities across the country, including Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Virginia, and the Naval War College, and has received grants and fellowships from the Pew Charitable Trust, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, The Nation Institute, and the Kopkind Foundation. His writing on music was selected for the Da Capo’s annual BEST MUSIC WRITING volumes in 2004 and 2008. He has also written for Mother Jones, New York, The Nation, The New Republic, New Statesman, The Washington Post, Salon, Daily Beast, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Oxford American, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Baffler, and The Forward. He’s been a frequent guest on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and NPR’s “Fresh Air,” and has appeared on HBO’s Bill Maher Show, Comedy Central’s Daily Show, NBC Nightly News, CNN, NPR, BBC, and other media venues.

Sharlet lives in Lyme, New Hampshire with his wife, the historian Julia Rabig, and their daughter.