Normandale Writing Festival Returns for its Third Year!

Harriet A. Washington and Cheryl Strayed to Speak at Normandale Writing Festival on April 19, 2012

April 19, 2012, marks the third year of the NORMANDALE WRITING FESTIVAL. (Click link for full schedule!)  Sponsored by the Normandale Writing Center, the free, daylong event features hourly presentations on all aspects of writing. Sessions take place between 9:00 and 4:00. The panels are conducted by professional instructors and published authors. Sample topics include: “Hip Hop: Culture, Poetry and Self-Expression,” “Social Media Writing for Beginners,” and “Fish Cheeks: Writing About Your Life in Two Cultures.” The Normandale Writing Festival is cross-curricular, including professional, literary, and creative modes of thinking and writing. All panels and events are free and open to the public.
Harriet Washington 
will be the keynote speaker at the Normandale Writing Festival on Thursday, April 19, 2012. She will be speaking from 1:00-2:30 at the Fine Arts Auditorium, room F1265. Harriet Washington is an award-winning medical writer and editor, and the author of the best-selling book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. During her keynote address, Washington will discuss her work and the art of writing for the sciences. Her most recent book is Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself--And the Consequences for Your Health and Our Medical Future.


Medical Apartheid, the first social history of medical research with African Americans, was chosen as one of Publishers’ Weekly Best Books of 2006. The book also won the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Award, a PEN award, 2007 Gustavus Myers Award, and Nonfiction Award of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It has been praised in periodicals from the Washington Post and Newsweek to Psychiatric Services, the Economist, Social History of Medicine and the Times of London and it has been excerpted in the New York Academy of Sciences’ Update. Experts have praised its scholarship, accuracy and insights.

Figure 1:  Harriet Washington in Her Home Library (CNN.com)

Washington wrote Medical Apartheid while she was a Research Fellow in Ethics at Harvard Medical School. She has worked as a Page One editor for USA Today, as a science editor for metropolitan dailies and several national magazines, and her award-winning medical writing. Her work has appeared in Health, Emerge and Psychology Today, as well as such academic publications as the Harvard Public Health Review, the Harvard AIDS Review, Nature, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The American Journal of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine. Her awards include the Congressional Black Caucus.


Cheryl Strayed will also appear at the Normandale Writing Festival to lead a discussion on “Writing Memoir” and read from her latest work, Wild. She will be speaking from 11:00-11:50 in room F 1265. Her appearance at the festival is co-sponsored by the Normandale Reading Series. Strayed is the author of three books: Wild, a memoir (Knopf, 2012), Tiny Beautiful Things, a selection of her "Dear Sugar" columns from TheRumpus.net (Vintage, July 2012), and Torch, a novel (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Wild has been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon's production company, Pacific Standard.