Ann Patchett reads from her fifth novel *Run*, which explores what "family" means and how we forge our allegiances while still asserting our identities. Set within a 24-hour period, the novel, like much of Patchett's work, examines what happens when disparate lives intersect, as well as the obligations we bear to strangers. *Run* is both the story of one loving family's insular bonds and an examination of community, for which we are all accountable.
Ann Patchett was born in Los Angeles in 1963 and raised in Nashville. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1990, she won a residential fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she wrote her first novel, *The Patron Saint of Liars*. It was named a *New York Times* Notable Book for 1992. In 1993, she received a Bunting Fellowship from the Mary Ingrahm Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Patchett's second novel, *Taft*, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best work of fiction. Her third novel, *The Magician's Assistant*, was short-listed for England's Orange Prize and earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship.