SARAH VOWELL

Assassination Vacation

April 11 at 7:30pm · Mountainlair Ballroom

Sarah Vowell is a best-selling author, social observer, and contributor to public radio’s This American Life. The San Francisco Chronicle has called her “one of the more important voices of her generation.”

Vowell’s New York Times bestselling novel Assassination Vacation is a hilarious and haunting road trip through the tourist destinations of three assassinated American presidents: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, and William McKinley. The Miami Herald raves “[Vowell] is the history teacher we all wanted in school: whip-smart, hilariously self-deprecating and gifted with the power to make the invisible appear vividly before our eyes.”

Vowell is best known for her monologues and documentaries on This American Life. A contributing editor since 1996, she has been a staple of the program’s popular live shows around the country, for which The New York Times has commended her “funny querulous voice and shrewd comic delivery.”

As a critic and reporter, Vowell has contributed to numerous newspapers and magazines, including Esquire, GQ, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, Spin, The New York Times Book Review, and McSweeney’s. She is a former columnist for Time, Salon.com, and San Francisco Weekly. Her essays appear in The Rose and the Briar, The Future Dictionary of America, Dial-A-Song: Twenty Years of They Might Be Giants, Marcel Dzama’s The Berlin Years, and Richard Ross’ Waiting for the End of the World. Vowell is also a fellow at the New York Institute for Humanities at NYU.

Vowell has also made numerous television appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and is a regular on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. She is president of the board of 826NYC, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for students age 6-18 in Brooklyn. She is currently working on a new book about the Puritans, tentatively titled Puritan Nation.