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.

Safiya Sinclair

Prize winning poet Safiya Sinclair lends her poetic voice to the writing of How to Say Babylon: A Memoir. A beautifully crafted story of a woman “with a fire in her belly and a poem in her heart” who liberates herself from a rigid Rastafarian upbringing and strict patriarchal rule through education and writing poetry. Rich in emotion, lyrical prose, and page-turning drama, readers will feel the author’s soul in every passage.

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.

Roberta Smoodin

Meditations on the Meaning of Magic

Morning Session
Roberta Smoodin, author of Presto!

Roberta Smoodin

Go Anywhere, Do Anything, Be Anyone - The Magic of Writing

Roberta Smoodin, author of Presto and Ursus Major, talks about the liberation inherent in the act of writing. Ms. Smoodin is currently working on a novel concerned with the problems of biography and love triangle; and illusion and reality.

Tatjana Soli

A finalist for the 2010 Bellwether Prize, TATJANA SOLI’s debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, provides a unique and multilayered perspective of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a woman among men, a female photojournalist. A graduate of Stanford University and the Warren Wilson College, Ms. Soli lives in Orange County.

Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta is the author of Stone Arabia, a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her previous novels are Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award Finalist, and Lightning Field, which was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the West. Spiotta has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.

Ann Stanford

Trampling Out The Vintage

Morning Session
Ann Stanford, PhD., poet, and editor of The Women Poets in English is joined by Robin Johnson PhD., poet-in-residence at Pepperdine for this discussion.

Lynn Stegner

LYNN STEGNER’s most recent novel, Because a Fire Was in My Head, was the recipient of the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for Best Novel of 2005. Her soul-felt portrait of a lost woman is “authentically compassionate as it is unsparing, a rare feat in fiction and in life.” Ms. Stegner has written three other award-winning novels and is currently at work on a collection of short stories.

Janet Sternburg

What makes women write? In The Writer on Her Work, Volumes I & II, Janet Sternburg has gathered answers from more than three dozen major American women writers. Authors as diverse as Alice Walker, Joan Didion and Jan Morris talk about what it means to be a woman and a writer. Sternburg’s work provides an excellent guide to some of the most important and interesting women writing today.

Ruth Stone

Ruth Stone is a eminent poet, mentioned for the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote In An Iridescent Time, Topography and Other Poems, Unknown Messages and Cheap. The reader in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women will see her own sisters and mother, friends, and perhaps herself. Rarely stuffy, her poems seem to say life is good no matter how hard. Stone has worked as a poet-in-residence and teacher, raised three children, and involved herself with drum music, bus travel and the women’s liberation movement. Her newest collection of poems is Second Hand Coat.