Nina Sankovitch

Nina Sankovitch has written two books of non-fiction. The first, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, a memoir of a year of reading a book a day, came out in 2011. Catalyzedby the loss of her sister, Nina spent one year savoring a great book every day, from Thomas Pynchon to Nora Ephron, from Dickens to Coetzee, and beyond. In the tradition of Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and Joan Dideon’sA Year of Magical Thinking, Nina's soul-baring and literary-minded memoir is a chronicle of loss, hope, and redemption. Described as a must-read by Oprah Magazine and hailed as an outstanding debut by Kirkus Reviews, Tolstoy and the Purple Chair is for anyone who has ever found refuge -- or comfort or escape or joy - in a book. Nina's second book, Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Celebrating the Joys of Letter Writing, came out in 2014 from Simon & Schuster. The book begins with Nina's discovery of a trove of hundred-year old letters written by a Princeton freshman in to his mother in the early 1900s. Nina’s own son is heading off to Harvard and she wants him to write to her, as the Princeton student wrote his mother and as Nina wrote hers. But times have changed. Before Nina can persuade her child of the value of letters, she must first understand herself exactly what it is about letters that make them so special.Nina sets off on a quest through the history of letter writing—from the ancient Egyptians to the medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise, from the letters received by President Lincoln after his son’s death to the correspondence of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Sankovitch looks at the power of letters through epistolary novels, her husband’s love letters, and dozens more sources—including her son’s brief reports from college on the weather and his allowance.Nina reminds us that letters offer proof and legacy of what is most important in life: love and connection. In the end, she finds, the letters we write are even more important than the ones we wait for. Nina was born in Evanston, Illinois, and is a graduate of Evanston Township High School, Tufts University, and Harvard Law School. She lives in Connecticut.