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 Kronos.

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 has recently appeared in Singapore and New York City, (BAM), University of Iowa, UC Berkeley, and UCLA.

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

Earlier novels include The Beauty of Ordinary Things, Someone Not Really Her Mother, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, and Ohio Angels. Harriet’s 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 writes full time in Connecticut.

Author photo by Brigitte Carnochan.