Geraldine Brooks

GERALDINE BROOKS is the author of the novel March, which received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her novel, People of the Book, is scheduled for release January 2008. She is also the author of Year of Wonders, Nine Parts of Desire and Correspondent. Brooks was correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East.

Eleanor Brown

The sisters in Eleanor Brown’s entertaining and engaging new novel, The Weird Sisters, had an unusual upbringing, listening to their professor father speak primarily in Shakespearean verse. Brown’s novel focuses on what happens when the adult sisters gather to care for their sick mother. Their “weirdness” is explored with humor, compassion, and poignancy. In true Shakespearean fashion, all’s well that ends well.

Dorothy Bryant

Dorothy Bryant, publisher of Ata Books in Berkeley, speaks with honesty to the humanity of those without money, privilege or position in a variety of pertinent and timely novels. The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You is now a “cult classic,” A Day in San Francisco is relevant to the AIDS pandemic; and Ella Price’s Journal is a must reading for women. She achieves a splendid maturing in The Confessions of Madame Psyche.

Jan Burke

Novelist Jan Burke took the mystery-loving world by storm with Goodnight Irene. The unsolicited manuscript won her a three-book contract with Simon and Schuster. Sweet Dream’s, Irene and Dear Irene are the second and third novels in Burke’s Irene series. It will be hard to beat the excitement of her first novel. President Bill Clinton held Goodnight Irene up on national TV when asked what he’d been reading lately.

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler, a resident of Los Angeles, invents new societies to project ideas of women’s and racial situations into the future. Her intriguing grasp has brought the prestigious Nebula award and two Hugo awards. Books include Bloodchild, Patternmaster, Survivor and Clay’s Ark. Soon to appear: Xenogenesis Trilogy.

Bo Caldwell

BO CALDWELL’s debut novel, The Distant Land of My Father, details a journey to the magical land of the narrator’s childhood, Shanghai prior to the Japanese invasion. Selected as a Los Angeles Times Best Book 2002, the fictional memoir explores the themes of betrayal and forgiveness and the enduring love between a parent and child.

Bebe Moore Campbell

Bebe Moore Campbell brings us a sensitive, lyrical account of growing up “with and without my father” in her autobiographical Sweet Summer, a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Literature Award and the Midwestern Radio Theatre Workshop Competition. She is also the author of Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Novelist and short story writer, Bonnie Jo Campbell, released her latest story collection, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, this past fall. Her previous collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Campbell was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011 and teaches fiction at Pacific University. She lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Deborah Campbell

A Disappearance in Damascus is the gripping story of two brave women—a journalist and her Iraqi translator—and what happened when everything went wrong during their work together in Syria. This extraordinarily affecting account…memoir, history and mystery story… won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize and is now optioned for film and TV. Deborah Campbell has written for numerous publications and has won three National Magazine Awards.

Casey Cep

Offering a deeply moving portrait of Harper Lee, one of the country’s most beloved writers, Furious Hours also tells the story of Reverend Willie Maxwell, a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members to collect the insurance money. Lee attempted to capture the shocking murders, courtroom drama, and racial politics of the Deep South yet ultimately abandoned the project. Casey Cep brings these two stories to life.

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a story collection, Hunger, and two novels, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance. She has taught fiction writing at Stanford, Harvard, and the MFA Program for Writing at Warren Wilson College. Chang is the director of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Kate Christensen

Kate Christensen is the author of six novels, including The Epicure’s Lament, the PEN/Faulkner award-winning The Great Man, and The Astral. Her most recent book, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites, pairs a personal and social history with a passion for the culinary arts. Her essays, reviews and stories have appeared in Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal.

Catherine Chung

The Tenth Muse is a sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free. This impressive second novel from Catherine Chung interweaves myths and legends, both intellectual and familial, that grip the reader from start to finish. It captures a moment in time when the world was different but eerily echoes present-day struggles of race, gender, and how we belong in the world.

Jill Ciment

Jill Ciment, author of Small Claims and The Law of Falling Bodies, chronicles her adolescent years in her memoir, Half a Life. “I felt for girls my age; we were more likely to have gone out in the world like Huckleberry Finn. I thought it was a story no one ever told.” Ciment reveals all, sometimes to the reader’s discomfort.

Jennifer Clement

Jennifer Clement is the author of many books including Widow Basquiat, the acclaimed memoir of Jean Michel Basquiat. Her recent novel, Prayers for the Stolen, is a portrait of how the drug trade in Mexico has affected women. The book won an NEA fellowship and the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award and has been published all over the world to the highest praise.

Marcia Cohen

Marcia Cohen chronicles the women’s movement in her irreverent The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World. Focusing on Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer and Kate Millet, this revealing group portrait traces the women whose ideas and actions have profoundly transformed all of our lives. Cohen has written articles for The New York Times and Ladies Home Journal, and has been a reporter and editor for The New York Daily News.

Maryse Conde

Maryse Conde, novelist, playwright, producer, essayist, lecturer, and Professor of West Indies and African literature at the Sorbonne, this year is Fulbright Scholar in Residence at Occidental College.

Karen Connelly

Karen Connelly is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her novel, The Lizard Cage, was shaped by her immersion in the political struggles of Burma, and she explored the lives of Burmese rebels in her nonfiction work, Burmese Lessons. Her poetry collection, Come Cold River, was released last fall.

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933, has been hailed as a book that “should completely change historical interpretations of the life and times of Eleanor Roosevelt.” Cook’s biography of one of America’s most fascinating and influential political women is scholarly and absorbing. A historian and journalist, Cook is professor of History and Women’s Studies at City University of New York. She is currently as work on Volume Two.

Amanda Coplin

Writing with breathtaking precision and empathy, Amanda Coplin has crafted an astonishing debut novel, The Orchardist, about a man who disrupts the lonely harmony of an ordered life when he opens his heart and lets the world in. Recipient of the 2012 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award,Coplin lives in Portland, Oregon.

Kate (Shirley) Coscarelli

How to Find Fame and Fortune - A Novel Approach

Long Beach’s own Kate (Shirley) Coscarelli will share the experiences of writing and publishing a first novel.

Lynne Cox

LYNNE COX is a local celebrity – a long distance swimmer who lives in Los Alamitos, California. Her memoir, Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer is about her many incredible swims and her relentless drive “to establish bridges between borders.” Her understated style makes for gripping reading. Her memoir is about exploring the impossible and doing it!

Beverly Coyle

Beverly Coyle’s fiction bares hypocrisy and explores character with insight and humor. The Kneeling Bus and In Troubled Waters re-create small town Florida, examine how we face coming of age, racism, political correctness and Alzheimer’s disease. Taken In, her new work, is due in May.

Sloane Crosley

Sloane Crosley is a witty, urbane and madcap new voice in American letters. Sloane’s first book, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, was nominated for the Thurber Prize for best humor in America. Her follow-up, How Did You Get This Number, is a collection of fun and zany essays.

Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat’s two works…Breath, Eyes, Memory, a novel, and Krak? Krak!, a collection of Haitian stories….explore the lives of women who must prove themselves “brave as stars out at dawn.” Revelations unfold in elegant prose with the truth and lyricism of memorable poetry.