Acclaimed writer, ordained Zen Buddhist priest, chaplain, and animal rights activist Bonnie Nadzam ’99 has been highly successful in engaging deeply with the written word in all her endeavors. She graduated from Carleton as an English major with an environmental studies minor and earned an MFA in creative writing from Arizona State University before earning both an MA and PhD in English literature from the University of Southern California. In 2011, she published her first novel, Lamb, which was awarded the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize (now called the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize) and adapted into an award-winning independent film in 2015. Nadzam also co-authored a collection of short stories and essays that year, Love in the Anthropocene, with former Carleton professor Dale Jamieson. Her second novel, Lions (2016), was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award in Fiction. Nadzam’s writing is known for playing with readers’ expectations and grappling with what constitutes reality.
Amidst completing her third novel, Nadzam joined the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School as a research editor; she was later awarded a research fellowship contributing to a study on international animal markets and zoonotic disease. Now in a permanent role at Harvard, Nadzam guides writing workshops for fellows and faculty manuscripts about anthropogenic impacts on the natural world, including habitat destruction, climate change, zoonotic disease emergence, and industrial animal agriculture. She is on the editorial team for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law and continues to speak publicly and publish her own stories, essays, and scholarly work. She has stayed connected with Carleton in many ways, as a visiting assistant professor of ethical inquiry from 2019 to 2022, a co-teacher for a seminar about death and dying, a writer in the President’s office, and a contributor to the Voice.