Wendy Lesser is the founder and editor of the Threepenny Review and the author of a novel and several previous books of nonfiction, including Why I Read (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). She has written for the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. To complete this biography, she was awarded one of the first National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar awards, the only one given to a Californian in 2015.