David Shields reads a selection of his work as part of Northwestern University’s 4th Annual Writers’ Festival.

David Shields’s new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, was published by Knopf in February 2010. His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of eight other books, including: Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Utne Reader. He’s written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer.

Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Since 1996 he has also been a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into twenty languages.

Recorded Thursday, April 14 at the Hilton Orrington Hinman Auditorium.