Suzannah Lessard

Suzannah Lessard began her writing life at The Washington Monthly where she was a staff writer from 1969 to 1975, then went on to The New Yorker where she was a staff writer from 1975 to 1995. Since then she has been independent. She is the author of The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, published by Dial Press, a division of Random House, in 1996 and of The View from a Small Mountain: Reading the American Landscape in the Twenty-first Century (place-holder title) to be published by Dial in February 2017. She has also written for Harvard Design, Architectural Record The New York Times Sunday Magazine and other magazines. She is a recipient of the Whiting Award and the Anthony Lukas Award and has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars as well as a holder of the Jenny Moore Fellowship at George Washington University. She currently teaches non-fiction in MFA Writing programs at The New School, Goucher, and Queens University.

Suzannah will be collaborating with Jacob Levenson during her residency at Pioneer Works, together they will challenge the traditional way that Nonfiction has been handled in recent decades by developing a manifesto. The manifesto will probe the intersection of the external and internal — the societal and the subjective — with the aim of illuminating how people are making new meaning of the world.