Harriet Scott Chessman has published five novels and has created the libretto for MY LAI, a contemporary operatic piece composed by Jonathan Berger and commissioned by the Kronos Performing Arts Association.

Performed to great acclaim at Stanford University and the Harris Theater in Chicago, MY LAI has been folded into Kronos’s 2017-18 season.  It will appear in Singapore, New York City, (BAM), University of Iowa, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.

Chessman’s newest novel, The Lost Sketchbook of Edgar Degas, about the winter of 1872-3, when Degas lived with his cousins in New Orleans, has come out in 2017  with Outpost 19.  

Harriet is also the author of the novels The Beauty of Ordinary Things, Someone Not Really Her Mother, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, and Ohio Angels. Her fiction has been translated into seven languages, and featured in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR’s All Things Considered,  Good Morning America, and The Christian Science Monitor. 

Having taught English and creative writing at Yale University, Bread Loaf School of English, and Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program, Chessman now is a full time writer and editor in Connecticut.