Jennifer Michael Hecht

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of The Next Ancient World (2001), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and Funny (2005). She has published poetry and prose in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. She is the author of the bestseller Doubt: A History (2003). Her other books include The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France (2003), which won the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in intellectual history, and The Happiness Myth (2007). Hecht’s latest work of prose is Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It (2013). She earned her PhD in the history of science from Columbia University in 1995 and now teaches in the MFA program at the New School in New York City. Hecht lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and their two children.