Literary journalist and producer of a Netflix series Jeff Sharlet will present at The Tory Hill Authors Series on Aug. 21. Sharlet is an award-winning literary journalist and author of seven books including New York Times bestseller, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. He is also the executive producer of the top-rated Netflix documentary series based on the books.
His new book is This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers. In this masterful collection of images and reflections, he invites us to see his subjects – the people, moments and things we actively ignore or take no notice of.
“This is a book of other people’s lives, lives that became, for a moment – the duration of a snapshot – my life, too,” Sharlet said
He is the Frederick Sessions Beebe ’35 Professor in the Art of Writing, a member of the Society of Fellows, and Director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is an editor-at-large for Virginia Quarterly Review and a contributing editor for Harper’s and Rolling Stone. He has also contributed to The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, GQ, Esquire, Mother Jones, and more.
His work has earned numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award, the Outspoken Award, the MOLLY National Journalism Prize, the University of Virginia’s Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s Thomas Jefferson Award, and he has been the recipient of numerous fellowships from the MacDowell Colony.
He has been a frequent guest on The Rachel Maddow Show, Fresh Air, All In with Chris Hayes, CNN, and many other television and radio programs, and a speaker at colleges and universities including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, Penn, UVA, USC, University of Iowa, the Naval War College, and many others. He has been a Visiting Academic at Trinity College Dublin and a Visiting Research Scholar at NYU.
The Tory Hill Authors Series is an annual summer event sponsored by the Warner Historical Society showcasing locally and nationally known authors reading and talking about their books and personal experiences. The audience will be able to interact with the author online. The readings begin at 7 p.m. Tickets are $5 and may be purchased online at toryhillauthorsseries.com. A zoom link will be sent upon purchase.
The Warner Historical Society formed over 50 years ago to preserve, educate about and keep alive Warner’s heritage. The Society has yearly exhibits and programs in the Upton Chandler House Museum on Main Street and maintains the Lower Warner Meeting House which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.