William Deresiewicz, Englewood (USA), 1964. Award-winning essayist and critic, frequent speaker at colleges, high schools, and elsewhere, and author of the best-selling The Excellent Herd: Overcoming the Shortcomings of an Elite College Education. His new book is The Death of the Artist: How Creators Struggle to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Technology. Deresiewicz has published more than two hundred essays and reviews. He has won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Criticism, and a Sydney Award; he is also a three-time nominee for the National Magazine Award. His work, which has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The American Scholar, and many other publications, has been translated into more than fifteen languages and included in more than thirty college and school textbooks. He taught English at Yale and Columbia before devoting himself to writing full-time in 2008. He has lectured at more than 130 educational institutions and held visiting positions at Bard, Scripps, and Claremont McKenna Colleges, as well as the University of San Diego. Deresiewicz serves on the Board of Directors of Tivnu: Building Justice, a Jewish social justice space in Portland, Oregon, and on the Advisory Board of Project Wayfinder, which runs mentoring programs in schools across the United States and beyond.
