Lindsay Stern is an assistant professor of English at Texas State University, where she teaches fiction and narrative theory in the MFA program. She is the author of three books including The Study of Animal Languages, described as a "warm, satisfying novel” (Forbes) that “tracks the breakdown of an academic couple’s marriage while dissecting differences between language and communication, knowledge and truth, madness and inspiration” (Publisher’s Weekly). Named one of Vanity Fair's Most Anticipated Books of 2019, it won a Lois Kahn Writers' Award and the Iowa Writers' Workshop's Taylor-Chehak Prize.
Her first book, Town of Shadows, about a mender of rugs living in a dictatorship, was adapted into a dance by choreographers Brendan Duggan and Mallory Rosenthal. She has received a Watson Fellowship, an Amy Award, an Academy of American Poets' Prize, a Mahindra Postdoctoral Fellowship from Harvard University, and a MacMillan Fellowship from Yale University, where she received a PhD in Comparative Literature. Her cover story "The Divide", about a controversial experiment in the field of primatology, was nominated for a National Magazine Award by Smithsonian. New Literary History awarded the Ralph Cohen Prize to an essay she wrote on two forgotten poems by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the same pair of socks.
Photo credit: Lee Stern