Suzannah Lessard was a staff writer for The New Yorker for 20 years and, before that, an editor at Washington Monthly. She is the author of the memoir "The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family." She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship, the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington fellowship at George Washington University, and the Anthony Lukas Award for Works-in-Progress. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the New School, as well as in the low residency MFA program in Non-Fiction at Goucher College. Her newest book is "The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape."