Pitt Alumnus Rebecca Skloot Featured on Cover of Publisher's Weekly
Rebecca Skloot (MFA Nonfiction, 2008) is featured on the cover of the current issue of Publishers Weekly in promotion of her upcoming book from Crown, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which has been making quite the literary splash. The book, also her MFA thesis here at Pitt, delves into the fascinating and transcendent legacy of Henrietta Lacks, a Southern tobacco farmer, and more importantly, her cells.
From Publisher's Weekly:
"Henrietta Lacks was an accidental medical heroine. The black, 31-year-old mother of four died of cervical cancer in Baltimore in 1951. But before her death, doctors took cervical tissue samples that proved to be medicine's holy grail—Henrietta's cells (known as HeLa) were the first ever to survive in the laboratory, and the cells reproduced ad infinitum, providing material for medical research to be done outside the human body.”
Skloot's book was also recently named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick.
Read the profile of Skloot and her amazing journey to publication at the Publishers Weekly website.
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William Faulkner once said that few wish to write; most wish to have written. Pitt was where I fell in love with writing. Chuck Kinder was Director of the program, and he’d host legendary parties at his house in Squirrel Hill. It’s hard to explain how hanging out with Tobias Wolff or Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, affected me as a 23-year old writer. The program also brought Maxine Hong Kingston, ZZ Packer, and George Saunders to campus while I was there. Being around all these writers (in some cases, eating pizza with them at the scarred wooden table in the secret poker room of the Panther Hollow Inn) was intimidating, but I learned several things, chiefly that these successful people were much more well-read (and well-practiced) than I was, and I’d better get with the program.
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