Janet Fitch

Janet Fitch uses her native Los Angeles as a backdrop for her stunning first novel, White Oleander, a powerful saga about a young woman growing up as one of the thousands of foster children shuttled from home to home in a huge, impersonal city. Fitch has created an inspirational story dealing with the relationships between mothers and daughters and the search for personal identity.

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Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of the ALA Notable Story Collection Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry? Her eccentric debut novel, The Giant’s House, a tender story of a friendship between a lonely librarian and an eleven-year-old boy, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. In 1996 Granto magazine named McCracken one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists.

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Anchee Min

Anchee Min has of late become the darling of the media, a dramatic change for this former Maoist Red Guard teenager, and later, performer in the role of Madame Mao in Chinese film. From the experience she wrote Becoming Madame Mao, her latest novel, a powerful tale of passion, betrayal, and survival. Other books by Min include the memoir Red Azalea and the novel The Lost Daughters of China.

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Susan Minot

Susan Minot is the author of the novels Monkeys, Follys, and her latest, the highly acclaimed, Evening, an exquisite story of memory and desire. Minot’s other works include the short story collection, Lust and Other Stories, and the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s, Stealing Beauty. She has been included in the O. Henry Awards Pushcart Prizes, and the Best American Stories.

Sena Jeter Naslund

Inspired by a brief passage in Moby Dick, Sena Jeter Naslund created Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star Gazer, This uplifting story of one women’s spiritual journey was selected as on of the top five novels of 1999 by Time magazine. Naslund is also the author of the novel, Sherlock in Love, and the short story collection, The Disobedience of Water.

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Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki educates as she entertains in her novel, My Year of Meats, deftly and humorously weaving the stories of Jane, a young Japanese-American woman hired to select ideal American families to be filmed creating tasty meat dishes, and Akiko, a Japanese wife who watches on Japanese television the programs that are intended to encourage the Japanese consumption of more meat.

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Paula Sharp

Paula Sharp creates unforgettable characters who find themselves tossed about by powerful issues that cannot be ignored. This writer, attorney, translator, and parent has claimed the attention and praise of critics with, The Woman Who Was Not All There, Lost in Jersey City, Crows Over a Wheatfield, and her current I Loved You All.

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