Event Details

Elissa Schappell, author of the acclaimed collection of linked stories Blueprints for Better Girls, will read from her work at Queens University of Charlotte.  Blueprints for Building Better Girls was chosen as one of the "Best Books of the 2011" by The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal and O Magazine.  As Jennifer B. McDonald wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Schappell's stories acutely evoke the disorientation induced in women by our culture's barrage of mixed messages . . . . [Schappell] is a diva of the encapsulating phrase, capable of conveying a Pandora's box of feeling in a single line."

Schappell is also the author of the collection of linked stories Use Me, a New York Times "Notable Book," and a Los Angeles Times, "Best Book of the Year" and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award. She is also co-editor with Jenny Offill of two anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She is a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair, where she writes the "Hot Type" and "Just My Type" book columns, and is a Founding Editor of Tin House magazine. Her short stories, non-fiction, book reviews and essays have appeared in such places as The Paris Review, The New York Times Book Review, BOMB, Vogue, SPIN, One Story and The Literarian. She teaches creative writing at NYU and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Schappell's reading is presented by The English Department and The Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte.  The reading is free and open to the public.  Schappell will also be a keynote speaker at Queens' Writers Symposium on October 20.  For more information on the Writers Symposium at Queens.