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Amy Dickinson
Columnist, "Ask Amy"
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For more than a decade, advice columnist Amy Dickinson’s “Ask Amy: Advice for the Real World” has appeared in over 150 newspapers and been read by over 22 million readers daily. In her straightforward, yet traditional replies, Amy has covered issues ranging from online gambling and cyberbullying to gun ownership and transgender rights. A regular voice on NPR, she is a panelist on the popular NPR quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me and broadcasts her radio stories on All Things Considered.
A sought-after speaker, Dickinson draws from personal experience as well as from her columns to deliver inspiring and comic stories of her adventures and misadventures in parenting, “adult-ing”, and belonging to a community and family in the digital age.
Succeeding legendary advice columnist Ann Landers, Amy turns the homespun advice collected from her years as a single mother living in both urban and small-town America into sage wisdom for her legion of fans. A profile of Dickinson published in The Atlantic Monthly suggested that if Jesus wore a t-shirt, it would say, “What Would Amy Do?”
Growing up in the small town of Freeville, New York, population 505, Dickinson was heavily influenced by the stories and life-lessons passed down by her large extended family. Always interested in people and their stories, Dickinson feels that “one of the pleasures of being an advice columnist is that I’m granted little glimpses into the human condition.”
After leaving her Chicago home in 2007 to return to Freeville to care for her elderly mother, Amy reconnected with a high school friend, whom she would marry, and got a new full-time job: stepmother to her husband’s girls. The memoir based on this return to Freeville, Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things, was released in March 2017. “Funny, generous, thoughtful, and wonderfully crisp,” wrote Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, “Dickinson’s memoir is one of those tales that make you proud to be a human–with all our hopes, failures, and graces intact.”
A monthly host on The Moth in Chicago, Amy has been published in Esquire, O magazine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post and has been a guest on The Today Show and CNN’s American Morning.
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Topics
Topics
ASK AMY…GET ALL THE ANSWERS
STARTING FRESH: THE FINE ART OF THE DO-OVER
WHY COMMUNITY MATTERS: BIG LESSONS FROM A SMALL PLACE
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