ANNA QUINDLEN

Over the last 30 years, Anna Quindlen's work has appeared in some of America's most influential newspapers, many of its bestknown magazines, and on both fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists. She is a novelist and also writes the prestigious "Last Word" column in Newsweek.

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 has written four bestselling novels: Object Lessons (1991), One True Thing (1994), Black and Blue (1998) and Blessings (2002). How Reading Changed My Life was released in 1998. Quindlen is also 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).

Quindlen holds honorary doctorates from Dartmouth College, Denison University, Moravian College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Stevens Institute of Technology, Bates College, Southern Connecticut State University 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 was elected Chair of Barnard's Board of Trustees in 2003. She is also on the Council of the Author's Guild, the Board at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City and the Board of NARAL Foundation. She is a member of Planned Parenthood.