Unclaimed
Lawrence Weschler
Writing & Creativity
American author of creative nonfiction noted for art criticism, political reportage, and long-form profiles developed during two decades at The New Yorker.
Biography
Lawrence Weschler (born 1952 in Van Nuys, California) is an American writer of creative nonfiction. A 1974 graduate of Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1981–2002, producing work that ranged between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He has won two George Polk Awards (1988 and 1992) and the Lannan Literary Award (1998). His books include political reportage such as The Passion of Poland, A Miracle, A Universe, and Calamities of Exile, alongside his long-running “Passions and Wonders” series, which features titles such as Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees and Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder.
Weschler has taught at numerous universities and is distinguished writer in residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He served as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities (2001–2013) and is now director emeritus there, and artistic director emeritus with the Chicago Humanities Festival. He is a contributing editor to several literary journals, curator at large of Wholphin, former chair of the Sundance Documentary Film Fund, director of the Ernst Toch Society, and has written the Believer column “Pillow of Air.” In 2021 he launched the newsletter Wondercabinet with David Stanford.
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Books by Lawrence Weschler
Waves passing in the night
Waves Passing in the Night profiles Academy Award–winning sound and film editor Walter Murch and his amateur work in astrophysics as an outsider attempting to rehabilitate the discredited eighteenth-century Titius–Bode theory.