Anna Shechtman ’13 reading from her new book
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle (March 2024)
Anna Shechtman ’13 published her first crossword puzzle in the NY Times when she was nineteen and later spearheaded the The New Yorker’s popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse.
After graduating with highest honors in English Literature with an Art History minor from Swarthmore, Anna received her Ph.D in English and Film and Media Studies Yale. She is currently Klarman Fellow at Cornell University, where she will begin as an assistant professor in the English department in Fall 2024. The Riddles of the Sphinx, about the history of the crossword puzzle and the sexual politics of wordplay, will be published by HarperOne in March 2024. Anna’s writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Representations, The Yale Review and Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large.
On March 21 at 4:30 in McCabe Library LibLab, Anna will lead a seminar on her scholarly work-in-progress, The Media Concept: A Genealogy. To attend please rsvp here.
Shechtman’s visit is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s Spring ’24 series Media, Art and Technology.
Cosponsored by Art History, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Libraries
