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Lise Funderburg is a moderator, panelist and lecturer on issues of race, community and identity. She also leads workshops and classes on creative nonfiction, the personal essay, journalism and oral history. For a list of previous and upcoming engagements or to invite Ms. Funderburg to participate in your event, please contact
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 Lise Funderburg is a journalist, essayist, and critic. She received her undergraduate degree from Reed College in Portland , Oregon , her masters in journalism from Columbia University , and has worked as an writer, editor, and writing instructor since1986.
Funderburg has written book reviews, essays, and feature articles for such publications as The Nation, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, The Hungry Mind Review, and O, the Oprah Magazine.
Funderburg's first book, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity, was a collection of oral histories. It was widely reviewed, anthologized, and adopted into college curricula. In The New York Times Book Review, writer Kyoko Mori commented that Black, White, Other is "an important book...an example of how we can talk about race with feeling, humor and dignity."
As with Black, White, Other, Funderburg continues to investigate the ways in which people locate themselves in the world. Her next book, a combined social history and memoir called Pig Candy: A History of My Father, Race, and Place. And Pork, will be published in 2008 by the Free Press.
Funderburg won a 2003 Nonfiction Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and has twice been selected as the writer-in-residence at The James Thurber House in Columbus Ohio , during which she taught courses at The Ohio State University. She has taught at Rutgers University and is currently an instructor in creative nonfiction writing at The University of Pennsylvania. She has received research grants from the Dick Goldensohn Fund for Journalists, The Leeway Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation. Funderburg won second prize in the Blue Sky Essay Contest of 2002, and has been awarded residencies at The Blue Mountain Center and the MacDowell Colony.
Photo: Joyce George
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Praise for Pig Candy
"Pig Candy is a candid and moving memoir of a daughter's deep love for her father both when he is most difficult to love and impossible not to. Unforgettable and powerful, we are changed for the better by every page of it." -- Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying
"With Pig Candy, Lise Funderburg has achieved something very remarkable in contemporary memoir: a personal narrative that is crisply intelligent rather than cleverly self-satisfied, deeply and meaningfully emotional rather than soppily sentimental. Even better, she has used her considerable powers -- of private observation, of social empathy, and of historical imagination -- to transform an already gripping personal narrative into an overwhelming parable about race, family, and mortality. A wonderful book." -- Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
"With a daughter's compassion and a journalist's precision, Lise Funderburg recounts the final years of her father's life on his farm in Georgia. But Pig Candy is more than simply the story of George Newton Funderburg. It's an extraordinary portrait of how a difficult place shapes a man, how a daughter loves a challenging father, and how the act of remembering even the most painful aspects of our personal and collective histories can make us whole." -- Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race & Family Secrets
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