Moderator
James Wolcott Born and raised in Maryland, where he attended Frostburg State College before dropping out after his sophomore and heading to New York. James Wolcott is the long-time cultural critic and blogger for Vanity Fair. He is a contributor to The New Republic, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Departures, and other publications. He blogs at the Vanity Fair website, keeping tabs on politics, fashion, television, film the dance scene, books, birding, and whatever else pops up on the horizon.
His wife Laura Jacobs is a novelist (Women About Town, The Bird Catcher), a dance critic, a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and Vanity Fair writer; they share their apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights with two cats, Henry and Veronica. His memoir about the Seventies in NYC, those years of punk, squalor, and glory, Lucking Out, was published in 2011 by Doubleday. In 2013, Doubleday published his mammoth nonfiction collection Critical Mass, which received the PEN Award for Essays and Criticism in 2014. The paperback edition will be published this year, with bonus material.
He has also brought out three bestselling Amazon Kindle Singles: The Gore Supremacy, about the life and strife of writer-provocateur Gore Vidal; Wild in the Seats, a recreation of the tumultuous first performance of Stravinsky-Nijinsky-Diaghilev’s The Rite of Spring on its 100th anniversary; and King Louie, an examination of turbulent reign of the top comic of the decade, Louis C.K.
