UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Pulitzer Prize-winning author and masterful biographer Stacy Schiff discussing her latest book, The Witches: Salem 1692, at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 25, at UCSB Campbell Hall.
Books will be available for purchase and signing after the event.
The acclaimed historian is celebrated for her biographies, including Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) and Cleopatra: A Life, in which Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue her subjects from their legends.
Lauded for her deft forays into questions of women, power and history, Schiff’s latest book unpacks the deadly mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.
With The Witches, Schiff provides a psychologically thrilling and historically seminal account of the first great American mystery, a period that continues to capture public imagination.
During the exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter of 1692, a minister’s daughter began to scream and convulse, setting into motion a chain of events that would last less than a year but result in the hanging of 19 men and women.
In “an almost novelistic, thrillerlike narrative of those manic nine months” (The New York Times), Schiff applies her keen perception and narrative prowess to the Salem Witch Trials, the only moment aside from suffrage when women played the central role in American history and an episode that would shape the future republic in curious ways.
Schiff’s works of nonfiction have been deemed works of literature by The New Yorker, and her prose has been praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow, who surmised, “Even if forced to at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or a lame sentence.”
Published in October 2015, The Witches is Schiff’s fifth book.
Schiff’s biography Cleopatra: A Life was published to great praise in 2010, eliciting the award-winning author Simon Winchester to predict, “It will become a classic.”
A No. 1 bestseller, Cleopatra appeared on most year-end best books lists, including The New York Times’s Top Ten Books of 2010. It won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for biography.
Schiff is also the author of A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, which won the 2005 George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies and the Institut Français’s Gilbert Chinard Prize.
A Great Improvisation was also a Los Angeles Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune and Economist best book of the year.
Schiff received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov).
Her first book, Saint-Exupéry: A Biography (1995), received numerous awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities and was a director’s fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
She contributes regularly to The New York Times op-ed page, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications.
Watch an interview with Stacy Schiff about The Witches on CBS This Morning.
Tickets for Stacy Schiff presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures cost $25 (which includes a copy of The Witches), $15 for the general public and $10 for students with a valid I.D.
For more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures at 805.893.3535 or visit www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.
Betsy and Jule Hannaford are sponsors for the event.
UCSB Arts & Lectures gratefully acknowledges the generous support of SAGE for its major corporate support of the 2015-16 season.
— Caitlin O’Hara is a senior writer and publicist for UCSB Arts & Lectures.