Perri Klass is Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University. She attended Harvard Medical
School and completed her residency in
pediatrics at Children's Hospital, Boston, and
her fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Boston City Hospital.
Perri Klass has written extensively about medicine, children, literacy, and
knitting. Her nonfiction includes Every Mother is a Daughter: the
Neverending Quest for Success, Inner Peace, and a Really Clean Kitchen,
which she coauthored with her mother, and Quirky Kids: Understanding and
Helping Your Child Who Doesn't Fit In, which she coauthored with Eileen Costello. She is
also the author two collections and other works of fiction, including the novels The Mystery of Breathing and Other
Women's Children. Her most recent books are Treatment Kind and Fair: Letters to a
Young Doctor and The Mercy Rule, which will appear in 2008.
Her short stories have won five O. Henry Awards, and in 2006, she was the
recipient of the Women's National Book Association Award. She is a longtime
member of the executive board of PEN New England,
which she chaired from 2004 to 2006.
Perri Klass also serves as Medical Director of the Reach Out and Read National
Center, a literacy
program which promotes early literacy through the doctors and nurses who
provide primary care to young children at more than three thousand clinics,
health centers, hospitals, and offices around the country. Through her work
with Reach Out and Read, Dr. Klass has been able to integrate her commitment to
the health care of young children with her love of the written word. In an
essay on the program, she wrote, "When I think about children growing up
in homes without books, I have the same visceral reaction as I have when I
think of children in homes without milk or food or heat: It cannot be, it must
not be. It stunts them and deprives them before they've had a fair
chance."
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