2016 Brendan Gill Lecture to feature Stacy Schiff

The Bronxville Historical Conservancy will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and best-selling author Stacy Schiff at the 2016 Annual Brendan Gill Lecture on April 15, 8:00pm in Reisinger Auditorium at Sarah Lawrence College. Schiff will discuss The Salem Witch Trials: What Really Happened and Why It Matters in 21st Century America. This free program includes a reception with the author immediately following the presentation. Seating is limited; please register at events@b-h-c.org or call 914-961-6790.

Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Amérique. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. Cleopatra: A Life was published to great acclaim in 2010.

Her most recent book, The Witches, Salem, 1692, immediately climbed to a number of must-read book lists, including USA Today’s Top 10 Books of 2015. “An exhaustively researched, gorgeously written history of the Salem witch trials that unearths what really happened and why it matters in 21st Century America.” David McCullough proclaimed, “History in the hands of Stacy Schiff is invariably full of life, light, shadow, surprise, clarity of insight, and so it is again, and then some, in her latest work, The Witches. Few writers combine as she does superb scholarship and an exceptional gift for language with amazing reach and agility of mind. This is a superb book.”

Schiff has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a Director’s Fellow at the Cullman 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. In 2011 she was named a Library Lion of the New York Public Library.

Now in its eighteenth year, the Brendan Gill Lecture was established as a gift to the larger Bronxville community and is one of the many programs the Conservancy offers to increase awareness of the village’s history and appreciation of its rich culture. The event honors former Bronxville resident, Brendan Gill, who was called by architecture critic Paul Goldberger “the greatest public citizen of our time in the realm of architecture, planning, and historic preservation.” Previous Gill Lecturers include Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Meacham, National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Philbrick, biographer Walter Isaacson, historians David Halberstam, Harold Holzer, Kenneth Jackson and David Eisenhower, among others.