Pitt Hosts Author and Journalist Jeff Sharlet April 3

PITTSBURGH—National bestselling author Jeff Sharlet will deliver a reading from his award-winning works of literature at 8:30 p.m. April 3 in the University of Pittsburgh’s Frick Fine Arts Auditorium, 650 Schenley Dr., Oakland. The free, public event is part of the University’s 2013-14 Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series. 

Sharlet’s work largely focuses on issues surrounding religion in American society. His most recent book, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between (W.W. Norton, 2011), garnered wide critical acclaim in The Boston Globe and The Washington Post among other notable publications. 

“Part reporter, part prophet, Jeff Sharlet is an American visionary in the lineage that runs from Twain to Robinson Jeffers to Sam Shepard and Joan Didion,” said Pitt English professor Peter Trachtenberg. “In Sweet Heaven When I Die, he scours the desert margins of our culture, politics, and religion, training his eye on outlaws, anarchists, fanatics, and saints. In this way, he reveals the unexpected shape of our nation’s center, which is to say, our heart.”

In addition to Sweet Heaven When I Die, Sharlet is the author of C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy (Little Brown, 2010) and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalist at the Heart of American Power (Harper Collins, 2008). He is a coeditor of Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches From the Margins of Faith (Beacon Press, 2009) and a coauthor of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press, 2004), which was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the best religion titles of 2004. Sharlet’s work has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forward, The Nation, The New Republic, and the Oxford American, among others. 

Sharlet is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College, where he teaches creative nonfiction. He is the founder of two online journals: Killing the Buddha, a literary magazine focused on matters of religion, and The Revealer, a daily review of religious matters in the national media. He also is a contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone. 

Sharlet’s awards and accolades include the Molly National Journalism Prize, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission’s Outspoken Award, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s Thomas Jefferson Award, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Award for Excellence in Feature Writing. 

The University of Pittsburgh Writing Program and University Store on Fifth cosponsor the 2013-14 Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series season. For more information, visit www.pghwriterseries.wordpress.com or contact 412-624-6508. 

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