PULITZER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR TO BE THE FIRST OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM FOR PITT WRITERS SERIES

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 6 -- Susan Sheehan, New Yorker magazine staff writer and winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for "Is There No Place on Earth for Me?" will be the first author of the millennium at the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series on Tuesday, Jan. 25, at 8:15 p.m., in the University of Pittsburgh's David Lawrence Hall, Room 120, Oakland.

Author of six nonfiction books, Sheehan is perhaps best known for "A Welfare Mother" and "A Prison and a Prisoner," which documents a year she spent at a New York penitentiary. Her Pulitzer Prize winning book follows a schizophrenic patient through the maze of bureaucratic "snarl-ups" and uncertain treatment in state mental institutions.

Sheehan began her career as an editorial researcher at Esquire-Coronet and became a staff writer at the New Yorker just three years after she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley. While she writes primarily for the New Yorker, Sheehan also has contributed articles to the New York Times, The Washington Post, Atlantic, Harper's, the New Republic, and other leading publications.

In addition to the Pulitzer, she has won numerous awards, including Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellowships, and was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1992. She has served as both a member and chair of the Pulitzer Prize Nominating Jury in General Nonfiction and a judge for the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

She and her husband, Neil Sheehan, also a Pulitzer Prize winner for nonfiction, live in Washington, D.C. They have two daughters.

The Contemporary Writers Series is co-sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh's English Department, Western Pennsylvania Writing Project, Africana Studies Program, The Book Center, and the Wyndham Garden Hotel.

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