"Love, Acceptance, Celebration: How Parents Make Their Children"

The most basic mechanism of resilience is the ability to construct meaning out of adversity. Is that meaning inherent? Is it somehow manufactured? Are there intimacies that are contingent on pain? In this lecture, Andrew Solomon will draw on his life's work for insight, speaking about his time in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, his experience in depression, and his work with families of extraordinary children. From these experiences, he will offer a perspective about meaning drawn from adversity and the functions it serves.

Andrew Solomon is a critically acclaimed author, lecturer, and regular contributor to NPR, The New York Times, and many other publications. He is currently a lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, and is an activist and philanthropist for LGBT rights, mental health, education, and the arts.

Solomon is the author of several books, including The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which won the 2001 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children, but also find profound meaning in doing so. A New York Times bestseller, it has been published in twenty-two languages and received the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. 

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PRESS COVERAGE:
Author Andrew Solomon to give lecture on families | Salt Lake Tribune
Author Andrew Solomon to lecture on family issues at University of Utah | Deseret News