Suzannah Terry Lessard (born December 1, 1944) is an American writer of literary non-fiction. She has written memoir, reportorial pieces, essays, and opinion.

Life

Lessard was born in Islip, New York to John Ayres Lessard and Alida Mary (White). She is the great-granddaughter of architect Stanford White. She has taught at Columbia School of the Arts, Wesleyan University, The New School, George Mason University, George Washington University, and Goucher College MFA in Creative Non-fiction. She was one of the first editors of the Washington Monthly from 1971 to 1974. From 1975 to 1995 she was a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine She has also published in New York Times Magazine, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, and Wilson Quarterly and Harvard Design.

Awards and honors

Fellowships

Works

She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family (1996). Her next book, Dreamscape: Finding Our Way in a Time of Epochal Change was, as of fall 2011, in editorial process. It is a reportorial essay about the experience of going from the Industrial Age to the Information Age with changes in the form and meaning of landscape and place as the point of entry. Her next book, The View From a Small Mountain: Reading the American Landscape was published in 2017. In 2019, Lessard published The Absent Hand:Reimagining Our American Landscape which Michael Kimmelman described as “thoughtful, exquisitely written collection of interconnected essays…”

Anthologies