Rivka Galchen - Distinguished Writers Series

Rivka Galchen is an award-winning fiction, and long-form non-fiction writer, known especially for her interest in the relationship between fiction and science. Holding an MD, she has drawn on her understanding of scientific and clinical approaches to pursue questions about the relationship between fact and value, science and fiction, truth and deception in her writings. Her award-winning novels, Atmospheric Disturbances and Everyone Knows your Mother is a Witch, explore these questions in different contexts. The first focuses on an unreliable first-person narrator who may be a clinical psychologist who believes his wife has been replaced by a replica, and the second features the historical seventeenth-century witch trial of the mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler. She has also written a shorter book titled Little Labors about motherhood. Galchen has an enormous number of essays, reviews, and non-fiction reporting, often featured in The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. She is currently completing a book titled The Lives of Scientists, which brings together science and history through biography to examine how lived experience informs the scientific imagination. Galchen earned her MD from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and her MFA from Columbia University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2017 and has taught in the Hunter MFA Program.

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