The idea of a split personality is really common. I think it’s mostly confusions about what schizophrenias even are. What do you see as the biggest, most common misconception or misrepresentation of the schizophrenias? Wang spoke with the Cut about her new book, unanswerable questions, and navigating the challenges she writes about. And in another, she questions the line between mental illness and prophetic visions, and whether there’s a spiritual element to what she’s experiencing. In another, she describes her experience with involuntary commitment, and interviews people on both sides of the heated debate about whether involuntary mental-health care helps or hurts those who are suffering. In one essay, she describes how she was essentially kicked out of college when her psychosis started acting up, and tackles questions about how mental illness is treated on campuses. In The Collected Schizophrenias, she describes the convoluted and frustrating path that led to this final diagnosis, which was later complicated with an additional diagnosis of late-stage Lyme disease. Wang was originally diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and later with schizoaffective disorder.

We've had phenomenal guest lecturers like T Kira Madden, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Leslie Jamison, and our students have gone on to nab book deals and publish in top-tier publications.In her Graywolf Nonfiction Prize–winning essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias (out February 5 from Graywolf), Esmé Weijun Wang combines research and reporting with personal storytelling to examine some of the biggest questions and challenges in the way society views, treats, and talks about mental illness - specifically the widely misunderstood and misrepresented category known as the schizophrenias. I’m also the founder of The Unexpected Shape™ Writing Academy, which is a full-service online writing school for people with limitations who want to write memoir and/or personal nonfiction. Finally, my short story, “What Terrible Thing It Was,” was featured in the Best American Short Stories 2018 anthology. I write essays that have been published in the Believer, Catapult, Hazlitt, and Salon.

In 2018 I received the prestigious Whiting Award for Nonfiction. My debut novel, The Border of Paradise, has received accolades and kind words from places such as LitHub, NPR Books, and the Chicago Review of Books I was selected by Granta for their once-a-decade Best of Young American Novelists list of 21 authors under 40. My essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, was a New York Times bestseller its publication is the result of having won the 2016 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.

The collected schizophrenias book