Anna Quindlen
Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist ... Newsweek Columnist ... Novelist ... Social Critic
Over the past 25 years, Anna Quindlen's work has appeared in some of America's most influential newspapers, many of its best-known magazines, and on both fiction and nonfiction best-seller lists.
A columnist at The New York Times from 1981 to 1994, in 1990 Quindlen became only the third woman in the paper's history to write a regular column for its influential Op-Ed page when she began the nationally syndicated "Public and Private." A collection of those columns, Thinking Out Loud, was published by Random House in 1993 and was on The New York Times best-seller list for more than three months. In 1992 Quindlen won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
Quindlen joined the Times in 1977 as a general assignment reporter and was named the paper's deputy metropolitan editor in 1983. She wrote the "About New York" column from 1981 to 1983 and created the column "Life in the 30s" in 1985.
In 1995 Quindlen left the world of newspapers, which she had joined as a copy girl at age 18, to become a novelist full time. In October 1999, Quindlen again assumed the role of columnist when she took over the prestigious "Last Word" on the back page of Newsweek magazine.
Quindlen has written three best-selling novels: Object Lessons (1991), One True Thing (1994) and Black and Blue (1998). How Reading Changed My Life was released in September 1998, as was One True Thing, a Universal feature film starring Meryl Streep. Black and Blue, which spent six months on The New York Times best-seller list, was chosen for Oprah's Book Club and has been optioned for a feature film.
Quindlen also is the author of a collection of essays, Living Out Loud (1988), and two children's books, The Tree That Came to Stay (1992) and Happily Ever After (1997). She also wrote the text for the coffee table pictorial Naked Babies (1996) and Siblings (1998).
She holds honorary doctorates from Dartmouth College, Denison University, Moravian College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and Stevens Institute of Technology and was awarded the University Medal of Excellence by Columbia. She was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale and a Victoria Fellow in Contemporary Issues at Rutgers. In 1996 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Arts & Sciences. Glamour magazine named her one of its 10 Outstanding Women of the Year in 1991.
Quindlen is a graduate of Barnard College and serves on Barnard's Board of Trustees. She also is on the Council of the Author's Guild, the Board of St. Luke's School in New York and the Board of the National Abortion Rights Action League Foundation. She is a member of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Board of Advocates as well.
Anna Quindlen is married to Gerald Krovatin, an attorney, and is the mother of Quindlen, Christopher and Maria Krovatin. She lives with her family in New York City.
