SJSU Lurie Author-in-Residence 2017: Vendela Vida

Vendela Vida is a native Californian, journalist, editor, and novelist, and will serve as SJSU’s Lurie Author-in-Residence in 2017. She is the author of five books, including Girls on the Verge, a nonfiction exploration of how young women from a myriad of cultures come of age in modern America; And Now You Can Go, which The New York Review of Books describes as “a thriller about how we love and how we forgive and when and how we have to choose to do so”; and finally, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, a 2007 New York Times Notable Book of the Year that evokes a culture on the cusp of extinction. Her most recent novel, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, described by actress Lena Dunham as “part glamorous travelogue, part slow-burn mystery,” recounts a tale that investigates the frailty of identity. She received the 2007 Kate Chopin Writing Award and is a founding coeditor of the stalwart San Francisco publication The Believer, as well as the editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. She also collaborated with her husband Dave Eggers on the screenplay for the film Away We Go, which opened the 2009 Edinburgh International Film Festival. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and children.