SAL2 Public Writing Series

This workshop explores ways FAS ladder faculty can create an identity as a public scholar and bring their academic scholarship to an audience beyond academia.  Participants will learn how to articulate their identity as a public scholar and make their expertise more meaningful to more people by uniting the elements of their scholarly identity into a single sentence.

• Time and Location: TBD
• Presenter: Anne Amienne, founder and director of Scholars & Writers, a coaching and editing company that helps academics achieve their writing goals and reach larger audiences. While a Ph.D. student at Chicago, she created one of the earliest podcasts (under the pen name Anne Bramley) to bring her academic interests in food and culture to listeners outside the academy. That platform launched an agented trade book. Then at Duke she went through press training, became a faculty expert for the Communications Office, and experienced first-hand how universities work with media outlets to help academics make an impact. She has written for NPR, Saveur, and The Washington Post, and appeared on BBC Radio, NPR, Martha Stewart Living Radio, Australia’s ABC, and Ireland’s Newstalk.
• Lunch will be provided
• Open to FAS ladder faculty
• An invitation will be emailed to eligible faculty in the fall semester

On April 14, Meghan O’Rourke, Editor of The Yale Review and Professor in the Practice at Yale, discussed what editors are looking for and addressed common misconceptions that scholars may have when writing for magazines and op-eds.

Presenter: Meghan O'Rourke is a writer, poet, and editor.  She was formerly an editor at The New Yorker, the culture editor of Slate, co-editor in chief of Double X, and the poetry editor of The Paris Review. She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022), which was nominated for a National Book Award; the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and three poetry collections, the most recent of which was named a top poetry book of 2017 by The New York Times. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and more. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, and two Pushcart Prizes.
 

On February 24, 2025, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sarah Stillman discussed storytelling strategies for scholars who want to share the human story behind their research in order to engage a public audience. 

Presenter: Sarah Stillman, Lecturer in English at Yale, is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, where she covers criminal justice, immigration, climate change, and more. She is a MacArthur Fellow, and runs the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, producing collaborative investigative stories aimed at social change. She won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of injustices resulting from the felony-murder rule. She has also received two National Magazine Awards for public interest and the Hillman Prize for magazine journalism. She is a contributor to the best-selling anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. 

The first workshop of the series, Author Agency and Literary Agents: The Art of the Book Proposal, held on November 14, 2024, explored when to consider working with an agent, what to expect from literary agencies, and the financial and content-related concerns scholars should consider when seeking an agent to represent their manuscripts or proposals.

Presenter: Thomas LeBien, Founding Partner of Moon & Company, is a thirty-year veteran of publishing with experience at top-tier university presses and commercial presses. He was an Executive Editor at Harvard University Press; a Vice President, Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster; Publisher of the Hill and Wang Scientific American/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprints at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Editor at Princeton University Press; and Editor at Oxford University Press. He has been the editor or publisher of multiple New York Times bestselling books and award-winning authors and has provided guidance on all aspects of the idea-driven process of publishing and communication tailored to increase the visibility, reach, and influence of the writer’s areas of interest.