About the Department

Department of English

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Joshua Wolf Shenk

Director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House

Lecturer in English

E-mail: jshenk2@washcoll.edu
Phone: (800) 422-1782, ext. 7845
Office: The Rose O'Neill Literary House

Education

B.A., Harvard College, 1993.

Teaching Areas

The Art of Narrative
Creative Non-Fiction
History and Literature
Humor and Satire
The Life and Work of Abraham Lincoln
The Literature of Mental Health

Selected Published Works

Books

Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, (Houghton Mifflin Company) 2005.

Articles and Essays

"Lincoln's Great Depression," The Atlantic Monthly, October 2005.
"The True Lincoln," Time Magazine, July 4, 2005.
"EUREKA DEPT. The Suicide Poem," The New Yorker, June 17-24, 2004.
"Club Mad," The Washington Post, May 22, 2002 (review of Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America's Premier Mental Hospital, by Alex Beam).
"The Talking Curse," The Washington Post, January 20, 2002 (review of The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy, by Bonnie Friedman).
"The Things We Carry," Harper's Magazine, June 2001.
"Reassigning Tim Russert," The Washington Monthly, March 2001.
"A Melancholy of Mine Own," in Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey (William Morrow).
"America's Altered States," Harper's Magazine, May 1999.

Honors and Affiliations

Advisory Council Member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission
Advisory Council Member of the Maryland Center for the Book
General Council Member for Stories at the Moth
Contributing Editor for The Washington Monthly
Advisory Council Member to the Shul of New York
2005-2006 Fellow in Non-Fiction Literature at the New York Foundation for the Arts
Received the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship in Mental Health Journalism at the Carter Center
Received the Frank Whiting Scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference
Residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Blue Mountain Center

Biographical Note

Joshua Wolf Shenk is an essayist and the director of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times, among others, and in the national bestseller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, edited by Nell Casey. He is the author of Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, which was named one of the best books of 2005 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and has won awards from The Abraham Lincoln Institute, the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the National Mental Health Association.