Wednesday with WashU: A Conversation with Ann Brashares

Join Danielle Dutton, associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences, on Wednesday, May 25 for a livestreamed interview with Ann Brashares, WashU parent and New York Times Bestselling author.

Wednesdays with WashU is a webinar series featuring Washington University alumni, faculty, parents, and friends from around the world. Join Danielle Dutton, associate professor of English in Arts & Sciences, for a Q&A with bestselling author Ann Brashares.

About Ann Brashares

Author Ann Brashares won millions of fans with her blockbuster series The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants in which she powerfully captures the emotional complexities of female friendship.

As an undergraduate, Brashares studied philosophy at Barnard College. Expecting to continue her studies in graduate school, she took a year off after college to work as an editor, hoping to save money for school. Loving her job, she never looked back, remaining in New York City and working in various editorial jobs until she began her first novel, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, which became an international best seller.

Over the next five years she wrote three sequels – The Second Summer of the Sisterhood, Girls in Pants, and Forever in Blue. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was made into a popular feature film and released by Warner Brothers in 2005, and the sequel was released in 2008. Her first adult novel, The Last Summer (of You and Me) was released in 2007. A companion book to the Sisterhood series, 3 Willows: The Sisterhood Grows, was published in 2009. The second companion book, Sisterhood Everlasting, was published in 2011. Her second novel for adults, My Name is Memory was published in 2010 and has been optioned for film. Brashares' young-adult time travel novel, The Here and Now, was published in April 2014 and The Whole Thing Together was published in 2017.

Brashares a mother of four and lives in New York City. She is married to artist Jacob Collins and grew up in and around Washington, D.C. Before becoming a writer, she was a receptionist, an editor, a ghostwriter, and briefly, the co-president of a small media company. 

Ann Brashares loves babies and children (many of whom are no longer children), teaching, gardening, and the effort, more generally, of growing and taking care of living things, in some cases fictional. She also loves walking, running, and biking around New York and other – especially old – cities. She loves reading fiction, poetry, and history; She loves talking about ideas and also arguing about them in a civilized way. And she prizes curiosity above intellect and cherishes her friendships. 

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