A Talk by Alice LaPlante (November 2013)

The AUS Department of English and the Sharjah International Book Fair present a talk by Alice LaPlante

American author Alice LaPlante is a writer and teacher of writing who has more than 20 years experience as an award-winning journalist, corporate editorial consultant, writing coach, and university-level writing instructor. She is an award-winning fiction writer. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in fiction at Stanford University, and teaches creative writing at both Stanford and San Francisco State University. LaPlante includes among her publications a best-selling creative writing textbook Method and Madness: The Making of a Story (WW Norton, 2009). Her first novel, Turn of Mind (Grove Atlantic, July 2011) became a New York Times, NPR, and American Independent Booksellers Association bestseller within a month of release. It won the Wellcome Prize for medical writing, the California Book Award, and the silver medal for Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers program. Turn of Mind was also designated a New York Times Editors' Choice, and was an NPR, O Magazine, Vogue, and Globe and Mail Summer Reading Pick.

LaPlante has also written extensively for business audiences, and has published features in Forbes ASAP, BusinessWeek, ComputerWorld, InformationWeek, Discover, and a host of other national publications. Her corporate clients include some of the best-known brands in the technology industry, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, Deloitte, Cisco, Google, Salesforce, and HP. She has written four business books, including Playing For Profit: How Digital Entertainment is Making Big Business Out of Child's Play (Wiley, 2000); and Passion to Profits: Business for Non-Business Majors (The Planning Shop, 2008).

LaPlante has a BA in Rhetoric and an MBA from the University of Illinois in Urbana.