Nancy Reeves

Nancy Reeves, attorney, lecturer, former member of the California State Board of Education, and feminist pioneer, is the author of the small classic Womankind: Beyond the Stereotypes.

Judith Merkle Riley

Judith Merkle Riley’s long time interest in the fourteenth century led her to write her first novel, A Vision of Light, in which the narrator is a remarkable woman, whose scribe is an impoverished priest. Ms. Riley’s research led to primary sources in the Huntington Library, which accounts for the rich detail she has woven into the exciting adventures of a heroine for all times.

Mary Roach

If you Google “America’s funniest science writer,” Mary Roach is the name that comes up! Specializing in the more bizarre aspects of science, she answers questions you didn’t even know you had. Her latest fascinating and witty adventure down the rabbit hole, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, explores the tricky terrain where humans and wildlife overlap… and often collide.

Roxanna Robinson

Roxanna Robinson, art historian and fiction writer, offers a brilliant biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Robinson combines her training in image and detail with emotional intelligence and a superior facility with language. Her fiction includes Summer Light and This Is My Daughter, and short story collections A Glimpse of Scarlet and Asking for Love.

Charlotte Rogan

After graduating from Princeton in 1975, Charlotte Rogan worked mostly in the fields of architecture and engineering. While staying home to bring up triplets, she taught herself to write. The result, her critically praised debut novel, The Lifeboat, is a psychological thriller of behavior when life is at stake.

Mary Doria Russell

Before becoming an award-winning novelist, MARY DORIA RUSSELL was a paleoanthropologist with specialties in bone biology and biomechanics. Her first two novels, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God, explored God’s role in our universe. Her new novel, A Thread of Grace, is a rich, complex account of Jewish refugees in Italy during World War II and the ordinary Italians who risked everything to save them.

Dori Sanders

Dori Sanders’s first novel Clover, was compared to the fiction of Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Zora Neale Hurston. Her Own Place delighted “with comedy and pathos of everyday life lived by everyday people - black and white.”

Whitney Scharer

The Age of Light tells the story of Vogue model turned renowned photographer Lee Miller, and her search to forge a new identity as an artist after a life spent as a muse. Lee’s journey takes her from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from inventing radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents.

Cathleen Schine

Cathleen Schine has written internationally best-selling literature, with two of her novels, Rameau’s Niece and The Love Letter, made into feature films. Her most recent work, They May Not Mean To, But They Do, combines dark comedy with astute observations of family dynamics, as does much of her writing. Schine resides in Venice, California.

Le Anne Schreiber

Le Anne Schreiber was the first female editor of the New York Times sports section before becoming deputy editor of the New York Times Book Review. Her memoir Midstream is a moving, beautifully observed journal about a mother’s death from cancer and a daughter’s renewal. It details both her new beginning and her mother’s demise with a sense of wonder, tenderness and occasional outrage.

Sandra Scofield

Texas-born Sandra Scofield resides in Oregon. She is the author of seven novels - most recently Plain Seeing and A Chance to See Egyypt - and a National Book Award finalist for Beyond Deserving. Her writing combines humor and pathos with a sense of history and place and an “extraordinary understanding of the power of absence.”

Carolyn See

What’s Novel in California?

Morning Session
Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times critic, author of Mothers, Daughters and Rhine Maidens.

Carolyn See

Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times book critic, also teaches English at Loyola Marymount University. She is the author of Rhine Maidens and co-authored Lotus Land with her daughter Lisa and John Espey. Her new novel, Blue Ground will be published in the Spring of 1986. She will keyote the conference on the subject, “Our Turn, Finally.”

Lisa See

Lisa, See, author of On Gold Mountain, traces the 100-year history of her family from China in 1871 to their sojourn in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles. It is at once the story of the See family, the Chinese culture, and the American immigrant experience.

Lisa See

Lisa See’s first book, On Gold Mountain: The One Hundred Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, traces the journey of See’s great-grandfather, Fong See, who became the godfather of Los Angeles’s China Town and patriarch of a sprawling family. It was a New York Times Notable Book for 1995. Flower Net, See’s riveting story of a murder investigation in today’s China, was nominated for an Edgar award for the best first novel.

Linda Gray Sexton

Linda Gray Sexton spares nothing and no one in her courageous memoir, Searching for Mercy Street. Her mother, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton, committed suicide when Sexton was a twenty-one year old Harvard student. Her book reveals the pain, explores the gifts, and accepts the love in their tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. Sexton has written several novels, one of which, Points of Light, was adapted for the 1994 television movie Reunion,

Laura Shamas

Prize-winning playwright Laura Shamas has given Los Angeles three productions in recent months: Delicacies; Telling Time; and Lady-Like which will open in Philadelphia and New York soon. Another twelve of her plays have been produced and eight are in publication, together with her new book Playwriting.

Evelyn Sharenov

Evelyn Sharenov, who lives in Long Beach, writes poetry ranging from her relationships with her daughter to her European origins via Ellis Island. We are hearing from her as her first “chapbook” of poetry is being published.

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.

Adrienne Sharp

In White Swan, Black Swan, Adrienne Sharp, once a ballerina herself, writes about the ballet world that she once knew intimately. She has created twelve interconnected and elegant short stories about the lives of professional dancers for whom fanatical devotion, emotional stress, and physical pain are the prices paid for success in this most demanding of the arts.

Elaine Showalter

Critic, feminist, and leading scholar of women’s literature, ELAINE SHOWALTER is the author most recently of A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Ann Bradstreet to Annie Proulx. The work is the first comprehensive history of American women writers from the 17th to 21st centuries and follows by 30 years her groundbreaking work, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. A professor emerita of Princeton University, she is a founding scholar of feminist literary criticism.

Sharon Sievers

Flowers in Salt is Sharon Sievers engrossing study of the birth of feminist consciousness in modern Japan. Sievers chronicles the early struggles of Japanese women - often against formidable odds - to improve their status and create a fragile legacy for future generations. Flowers in Salt has been called a classic example of the best uses of women’s history. It is important reading for those interested in understanding modern Japan as well as women’s struggle for equality.

Joan Silber

Novelist and short story writer JOAN SILBER received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for her first book, Household Words, and was a National Book Awards finalist. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Paris Review and other magazines. Her most recent books are Ideas of Heaven and The Size of the World. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Marisa Silver

MARISA SILVER is the author of Baby in Paradise, a short story collection that was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and Los Angeles Times Best Book 2001, and No Direction Home, a first novel which establishes her as on the the new literary voices of contemporary Los Angeles.

Lee Smith

Lee Smith’s writing “…sparkles like diamonds with all the diamond’s cutting edge,” revealing keen insights into small-town Southern life. Readers delight in Smith’s deft interweaving of lyric prose and richly comic scenes in her highly praised novels, which include, Family Linen, Fair and Tender Ladies, and Saving Grace, and in her three collections of stories, the latest of which is News of the Spirit.