Anne Fadiman’s 1997 book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures won the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award. Researched in a small county hospital in California, it examined a Hmong family from Laos with a child with epilepsy, and their cultural, linguistic, and medical struggles with the American medical system.
She has authored two books of essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998) and At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays (2007), a collection of essays on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, postal history, and ice cream, among other topics; it was the source of an unencrypted quotation in the New York Times Sunday Acrostic. She also edited Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (2005) and the Best American Essays 2003 (2003).
Fadiman was a founding editor of the Library of Congress magazine Civilization.
She was the fourth editor of the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly The American Scholar since 1997, and under her direction, it won three National Magazine Awards in six years. She left The American Scholar in 2004.
Since January 2005, in a program established by Yale alumnus Paul E. Francis, Anne Fadiman has been Yale University’s first Francis Writer in Residence, a position that allows her to teach one or two non-fiction writing seminars each year, and advise, mentor, and interact with students and editors of undergraduate publications.
In 2012 she received the Richard H. Brodhead ‘68 Prize for Teaching Excellence by Non-Ladder Faculty.