Ellen Pinsky and Michael Slevin at the Cambridge Public Library

Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Ellen Pinsky and Michael Slevin, co-editors of the highly praised essay collection Driven to Write: 45 Writers on the Motives and Mysteries of their Craft. They will be joined for a panel discussion with several of the book's contributors including, Robert Pinsky, award-winning author of over twenty volumes of poetry, Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard professor and author of Dark Renaissance, Ha Jin, the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at Boston University, and Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award-winning author of The Friend. This panel will be moderated by Rachel Dillon, poet and the managing editor of Ploughshares.

RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Driven to Write​​​​​​​ and pick it up at the event. Following the presentation will be a book signing.

Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.

In this book of essays, over 40 successful writers in varied fields —poetry, science, the performing and visual arts, psychoanalysis, journalism, literature and more— explore what drives them to write, and to work at their craft.

In contributions arranged under three headings— “Models and Mentors,” “Urges and Traumas,” and “Evidence and Experiences”—each writer explores their personal understanding of writing as a psychological necessity. In varying ways, these candid, often emotional essays reveal a range of intimate, mysterious and unpredictable purposes and motivations.

Driven to Write provides fresh, practical, and imaginative approaches to literary art for aspiring and established writers alike.

Ellen Pinsky is the author of Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: Mortal Gifts, a collection of essays about psychoanalytic ethics. About that book one reviewer writes: “This is a book to be read alongside Freud’s Papers on Technique.” Pinsky asks: “In the power-imbalanced relationship, behind closed doors, what is the patient’s protection from abuse?” Ellen Pinsky came to psychoanalysis as a second profession following twenty-five years as a middle school English teacher. She says her experience in the classroom with 12 year-olds taught her most of what she needed to know to become a creditable clinician.

Michael Slevin draws from his experience as a psychotherapist and journalism to find fresh perspectives on psychoanalytic ideas. He has been active bringing them outside the consulting room, to less privileged communities, and into political decision making. He recently co-edited The Trauma of Racism: Lessons from the Therapeutic Encounter (2023), which was heralded as a “humanistic approach to the problem of racial oppression.”

Robert Pinsky’s recent book of poems is Proverbs of Limbo. His PoemJazz album of the same title is available on Spotify and Apple Music. His autobiographical prose book is Jersey Breaks. Princeton University Press recently re-issued some two of his early books in one volume: On Poetry, Culture, and Democracy. As United States Poet Laureate, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, with brief videos in which thousands of American readers, of varying backgrounds, ages, and regions, read poems they admire by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Frank O’Hara, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glück, Siegfried Sassoon.

Stephen Greenblatt’s most recent book is Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival. Among the best-known of his previous books are Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve; The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; and Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. His awards include the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Italy’s Academia degli Arcadi, he is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and The Norton Shakespeare. Greenblatt lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Harvard.

Ha Jin was born in 1956, in Jin County, Liaoning Province. At age fourteen, he served in the PLA People’s Liberation Army), staying on the Sino-Soviet border in Hunchun, Jilin. He left mainland China for America in 1985 to do graduate work at Brandeis University, earning his PhD in English and American literature in 1993. Since the early 1990s, he has been writing in both English and Chinese. He is the author of more than twenty books. In English he has published nine novels, four short story collections, four volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and a biography of Li Bai. His awards include the National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the Asian American Literary Award. Currently he teaches fiction writing and migrant literature at Boston University, where he is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor. He lives outside Boston with his family.

Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. A collection of her short fiction, It Will Come Back to You, will be published in August, 2026. The Friend, a New York Times best seller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages.

Rachel Dillon is a poet and the managing editor of Ploughshares. The winner of the Academy of American Poets' Treehouse Climate Action Prize and the BINC Foundation's Susan Kamil Scholarship. She has also received support from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, the Asheville Poetry Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. A former high school English teacher in NYC public schools, she lives in Boston.

Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, United States

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