Wendy Lesser

Wendy Lesser (born 1952) is an American critic, writer, and editor based in Berkeley, California. She is the founding editor of the arts journal The Threepenny Review, and the author of a novel and several works of nonfiction, including most recently a biography of the architect Louis Kahn.

Lesser was born in 1952 in Santa Monica, California and moved in 1955 to Palo Alto, California, where she was raised. She is the daughter of Murray Lesser, an engineer and writer, and Millicent Dillon, a writer. She earned a B.A. at Radcliffe College in 1973; an M.A. at King's College, Cambridge, in 1973; and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982.

She is the author of several books, including a novel, The Pagoda in the Garden (Other Press, 2005), and the nonfiction book Why I Read (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014).

She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Dedalus Foundation, and the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, among other places.

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