Melanie Thernstrom to read as part of the Mary E. Rolling Reading Series

Melanie Thernstrom is the author, most recently, of The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), a New York Times best seller, as well as two other nonfiction books: The Dead Girl (Pocket Books, 1991), a memoir; and Halfway Heaven: Diary of A Harvard Murder (Doubleday, 1997), a work of investigative journalism. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and has also written for The New Yorker, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. A native of Boston, she graduated from Harvard with highest honors in English, and from Cornell with an MFA in Creative Writing. She has taught creative writing at University of California at Irvine, Harvard, Boston College, and Cornell, and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Edward Albee Foundation. She serves on the Committee on Advancing Pain Research, Care, and Education of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine. She lives near Portland, Oregon, with her husband and twins.