Avi Steinberg

Avi Steinberg, an author and essayist, has explored the intersections between the books we read and the lives we live. He is the author of three books, published by Doubleday Knopf, that blend the genres of memoir and criticism. The most recent, The Happily Ever After: A Memoir of an Unlikely Romance (Nan A. Talese, 2020), is on the art of popular romance literature. His essays and reportage have appeared in the Guardian’s long read, n+1, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. He is also at work on a new translation of the biblical story of David, which will be published by Liveright.

At Radcliffe, he is working on a biography of the writer and radical left political organizer Grace Paley. During his year in Cambridge, he will focus on the recently opened Grace Paley papers at Houghton Library in tandem with a larger investigation of the Houghton and Schlesinger collections associated with Paley’s comrades and colleagues.

A 2002 alumnus of Harvard College, Steinberg is a recent grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars program. His work has also received support from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where he was the Jean Strouse Fellow, and from the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY.