Abigail Padgett

Abigail Padgett’s Child of Silence, is the first of her Bo Bradley mysteries. It’s sequel, Strawgirl, won her an appreciative audience and glowing critical acclaim: The New York Times recommended it to President Clinton. Turtle Baby, the third in the series, was released in March 1995, and the fourth, Moonbird Boy, will be in bookstores April 1996.

Pamela Paul

Journalist and author Pamela Paul is the editor of The New York Times Book Review and oversees all books coverage at The Times. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Washington Post, Slate and Vogue. She is a former columnist for The Economist, The New York Times Styles section and Worth magazine.

In her most recent book, My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues, Paul reveals intimacies about her chronicle of every book she has read since the summer of 1988. Her previous books are The Starter Marriage and The Future of Matrimony, Pornified, Parenting Inc. and By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life.

Sharon Kay Penman

Sharon Kay Penman is an historian, attorney and author of two highly acclaimed historical novels, The Sunne In Splendour and Here Be Dragons. She currently is at work on a third novel.

Amanda Peters

BALLROOM SPEAKER

Written before her award-winning debut novel, The Berry Pickers, Amanda Peters’ collection of short stories, Waiting for the Long Night Moon, was “her writing training wheels.” Her stories in this collection are deeply rooted in the Canadian Indigenous experience. Whether re-imagining a story passed down from her elders or creating a story entirely from her own imagination, Peters explores a broad spectrum in time and place with unflinching honesty and offers a glimpse into the creative brain of a gifted storyteller.

Audrey Peterson

Audrey Peterson teaches courses in mystery fiction at California State University, Long Beach, and is the author of the informative and entertaining Victorian Masters of Mystery.

Jayne Anne Phillips

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS, author of Machine Dreams, Motherkind, Shelter and her award-winning Lark and Termite, is a consummate artist of contemporary American fiction. Her themes are powerful and probing; her prose stunningly beautiful. With wisdom and compassion, she delves into the dreams, thoughts, and memories of ordinary people as they face extraordinary experiences.

Wang Ping

The multifaceted WANG PING writes fiction, poetry and nonfiction and is also a translator, editor and teacher. Her works, including the nonfiction book, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, explore American and Chinese cultures. Born in Shanghai, Wang Ping currently teaches at Macalaester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Ivy Pochoda

“Destined to be a classic L.A. novel,” Wonder Valley is a tour de force thriller that compels with vivid story and challenging characters. While going in unexpected directions, this visionary work never looks away from the dark side of Southern California. It was an NPR and LA Times Book of the Year selection; and a finalist for the LA Times and Strand Magazine book prize. Visitation Street, Ivy Pochoda’s second novel, was an Amazon Best Book of 2013.

Susan Power

Susan Power’s first novel, The Grass Dancer, is the winner of the 1995 PEN/Hemingway award. Ther short fiction has appeared in such journals and anthologies as the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Story, and The Best American Short Stories of 1993. Alice Hoffman says of Power’s novel: “So stunning, so extraordinary in its depth and passion you will swear there’s a miracle on every page.” Her new work, War Bundles, centers on Chicago’s 25,000 member Native American community,

Nita Prose

Lovers of mysteries, take note! Nita Prose’s debut novel, The Maid, brings a unique perspective to a whodunit. One of the delights of reading this book lies in getting to know the one-of-a-kind heroine, Molly Gray, maid extraordinaire at the posh Regency Grand Hotel. While “bringing the room to perfection,” she discovers a dead body. This book will make you laugh, cry, and think, but mostly it will make you want to keep reading.

Barbara Quick

Of Barbara Quick’s first novel, Northern Edge, Ursula K. Lequin writes, “Literary Alaska has always been male territory. This vivid and engaging novel locates Alaska – at last –in women’s experience and what an experience!” The novel has been nominated for the National Book Award. Quick is one of 25 authors selected by B. Dalton book stores for their “Discover: Great New Writers” program. She is a poet and has reviewed extensively for the New York Times Book Review.

Linda Raymond

Linda Raymond, author of Rocking the Babies, intertwines her own experience as a neonatal respiratory therapist with memories of her mother’s volunteer role in a neonatal intensive care unit. This stunning result was recognized with the 1995 American Book Award, Honor Award in Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, and Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award.

Shelley Read

Inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the Colorado town of Iola in the 1960s, Go as a River is a story of deeply held love in the face of hardship and loss. It is also a story of finding courage, resilience, friendship, and , finally, home―where least expected. With a lyrical voice, Shelley Read’s stunning debut explores what it means to lead your life as if it were a river―gathering and flowing, finding a way forward even when a river is dammed.

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.

Nayantara Roy

BREAKOUT SPEAKER

In her sweeping multi-generational debut novel, The Magnificent Ruins, Nyantara Roy brings us the story of Lila De, a young Indian American editor in New York who inherits her family’s sprawling ancestral mansion in Kolkata, India. The inheritance forces her to confront her multi-generational family and particularly brings her face to face with her estranged mother. Lila discovers long-buried secrets, and her own conflicted feelings about her heritage and the two places she calls home.

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.

Anamely Salgado Reyes

BREAKOUT SPEAKER

A Mexican-American girl is forced to help her estranged grandmother’s spirit cross over by fulfilling her ornery spirit’s wish that her body be taken back to Mexico. In My Mother Cursed My Name a decade worth of resentment, secrets, generational curses and well-intentioned mistakes threaten to extinguish her private yearning and damage her relationship with her mother. To save themselves, each woman must seek to find the true definition of home.

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.”

Shannon Sanders

In her award-winning debut collection Company, Shannon Sanders crafts an exceptional multigenerational saga. Through interconnected short stories, she explores the complexities of identity, intimacy, and inheritance, bringing to life characters who bicker, celebrate, and confront their pasts. With sharp prose and deep affection, Company weaves a richly detailed tapestry of Black familial bonds, heralding Sanders as a powerful new voice in contemporary fiction.

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.