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CHIRS BOHJALIAN

Award-winning Author

NYS Writers Institute, April 11, 2002
8:00 p.m. Reading and Signing | Main Theatre, Performing Arts Center

PROFILE
CHRIS BOHJALIAN is an award-winning author of six novels. His novel Midwives (1997) was named one of the best books of the year by Publisher's Weekly, rose to #4 on the New York Times Bestseller List for independent book stores, and was selected for Oprah Winfrey's sales-boosting, non-for-profit Book Club. It is the harrowing tale of a Vermont midwife who becomes embroiled in a legal battle after performing a Caesarean section on a patient who has stopped breathing. Midwives was made into a movie starring Sissy Spacek which airs on the Lifetime Movie Network.

"a treasure. . .It is a rare pleasure when a finely written novel also grips with with sheer storytelling power." - The Portland Oregonian

Bohjalian's newest book is The Buffalo Soldier (March, 2002), the story of a white Vermont couple who take in a black 10-year-old foster child after their own twin daughters are killed in a flash flood. The novel explores forces of emotional death and rebirth as they affect one struggling family. Library Journals calls it, "a satisfying study of the intricacies of marriage, family, and grief."

Other books by Chris Bohjalian include Tran-Sister Radio (2001), the story of a Vermont professor who undergoes a male-to-female sex change operation; The Law of Similars (1999), about a romance between a Vermont state attorney and a homeopathic healer under criminal investigation; Water Witches (1995), about the clash between environmentalists and developers in a Vermont ski resort; and Past the Bleachers (1992), the story of a bereaved couple whose 8-year-old boy dies of leukemia, and the basis of a Hallmark television movie.

Chris Bohjalian, who lives in Vermont, has served as a book critic and columnist for Gannet's Burlington Free Press since 1987, and as a book critic for Vermont Life magazine since 1991. His next, as-yet-untitled book will be an historical novel set in Puritan Massachusetts in the 1660s.

Books by Chris Bohjalian:

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.