Thulani Davis

Thulanni Davis’s first novel, 1959 combines a coming-of-age story with a unsettling journey into the very beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, as told by a twelve-year-old girl named Willie. Davis is also a poet, journalist, and the author of the libretto for the widely acclaimed opera X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and the adaptation of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Nina de Gramont

Intrigue, love, loss, and murder all play a lively turn in Nina de Gramont’s fast paced and deliciously clever mystery, The Christie Affair. This nuanced tale explains the long unsolved 11 days in 1926 when famed novelist Agatha Christie went missing in the English countryside. Told through the eyes of Agatha’s husband’s mistress, this marvelous historical fiction is elegantly structured with more questions than answers until the subtle details are fully revealed at the end.

Louise De Grave

Breaking The Silence: Writing Your Autobiography

Louise De Grave, author of From This Day Forward: Staying Married When No One Else Is And Other Reckless Acts, and Karen Kenyon, author of Sunshower, team up to discuss the writing of their own stories, encouraging others to do the same.

Debra Dean

DEBRA DEAN creates heartbreaking beauty in her bestselling debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad. Awards for the novel included The New York Times Editors’ Choice, Borders Original Voices, number one Book Sense Pick, Booklist Top Ten Novels and American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. Her collection of short stories, Confessions of a Falling Woman, came out to critical acclaim in 2008.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s acclaimed collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage, was followed by an even-more-successful novel, The Mistress of Spices; and last summer by a book of poetry, Leaving Yuba City. All of her works deal with struggles of immigrant Indian women in families and relationships.

Harriet Doerr

Harriet Doerr, whose Stones for Ibarra, on the best seller lists for months this year, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award and the National Book Award for a first novel. With her first book published when she was 73, Mrs. Doerr provides a sparkling example to those faced with the challenge of crossing new borders.

Heidi Durrow

HEIDI DURROW’s debut novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is the winner of the Bellwether Prize for Fiction. Beautifully written in alternating voices, it is a very modern story that skillfully deals with a family tragedy that must be processed through the prism of biracial identity. The protagonist’s resilience makes it an ultimately hopeful story.

Carol Easton

Carol Easton, biographer of Stan Kenton, Samuel Goldwyn, and Jacqueline du Pre, now gives us No Intermissions: The life of Agnes de Mille, praised as “a valuable contribution to American cultural history.” A California native, she majored in Theater Arts at UCLA.

Betty Edwards

Drawing on the Right Side of Writing

Morning Session
Betty Edwards, Ph.D., author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

Jennifer Egan

Novelist Jennifer Egan has received prestigious prizes, literary awards and fellowships. Alice Adams says of Egan: “A highly original and unusually intelligent writer.” Her novel, The Invisible Circus, has been called an unforgettable first novel by a writer of uncommon ability. Robert Stone called it “dramatic, suspenseful and beautifully written.” Pat Conroy said that “Egan has written a splendid novel of depth and elegance.” Egan attended Cambridge University for two years on a Thouron Award and now lives in New York City.

Gretel Ehrlich

Born in California and educated at Bennington College and UCLA, Gretel Ehrlich is a much honored author of essays, memoir, fiction and poetry. Writing with grace and awe, she embraces such varied subjects as her love for animals, nature, and the American Mountain West, the clash and the fusion of diverse cultures, and the path of her own spiritual journey.

Delia Ephron

Humor and family life

Afternoon Session
Delia Ephron, author of Teenage Romance (or How to Die of Embarrassment) and How to Eat Like a Child. Childhood memories that bless and burn.

Jennifer Cody Epstein

The Painter from Shanghai is JENNIFER CODY EPSTEIN’s debut novel about the real life of Pan Yuliang, China’s foremost female post-Impressionist painter. The novel delineates Pan’s love story – for her country, artistic principles and the man who helps her realize herself as an artist. Epstein has written for Self, The Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune and teaches at Columbia University.

Maria Amparo Escandon

MARIA AMPARO ESCANDON, best-selling bilingual storyteller, was named Writer to Watch by Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. In her second novel, Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co., the incarcerated narrator “reads” to her fellow inmates at the weekly Library Club. As she pretends to recite from the classics, she tells a humorous and passionate mystery that explores the love and hurt of a father and daughter on the run.

Zoe Ferraris

Zoe Ferraris, an award-winning novelist, has an MFA from Columbia University. Her books, Finding Nouf and City of Veils , seamlessly blend the genres of mystery and literary fiction. Her work combines her own personal experience and her literary talent to deliver gripping, fast-paced mysteries with a rare, intimate look into the closed society of women in the Middle East.

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.

Montserrat Fontes

Montserrat Fontes spent her early childhood near the Texas-Mexico border, the setting for her novel, First Confession, which details in surprising and gripping fashion the secret world of two children approaching a momentous occasion in their lives. Fontes teaches advanced literature and journalism classes in Los Angeles while pursuing her studies of Faulkner, O’Connor, and McCullers, and completing work on a “prequel” to her first novel.

Earlene Fowler

Earlene Fowler writes mysteries about everything she loves: cowboys, the Central Coast, quilts, and crafts. With quilt-name titles - Fool’s Puzzle; Irish Chain; Kansas Troubles; Goose in the Pond; Dove in the Window - her tales feature fearless sleuth Benni Harper.

Karen Joy Fowler

KAREN JOY FOWLER introduces six notable characters in The Jane Austen Book Club; each with his or her own “private Austen,” each addressing very contemporary social issues. In sublimely comedic prose, Fowler takes readers on a journey of love, laughter, pain and Jane. Along with this most recent novel, which spent over three months on The New York Times bestseller list, Fowler has authored two short story collections and three novels.

Amaryllis Fox

Following her graduation from Oxford and while still finishing a master’s degree at Georgetown University, 21-year-old Amaryllis Fox was recruited into the CIA. In her riveting memoir, Life Undercover, Fox “engagingly and transparently” describes her undercover work in remote areas of the Middle East as an art dealer, infiltrating terrorist networks and hunting down arms dealers. It is a story of courage, passion, and intellect.

Laurie Frankel

Three unforgettable narrators tell a spellbinding story with wit, wonder, and deep affection in Laurie Frankel’s latest novel, One Two Three. This “warm, funny tour de force” explores how expanding our notions of normal makes the world a better place for everyone and how, when days are darkest, it’s our daughters who will save us all. A very different story indeed— “one that is delightfully memorable and wildly empowering.”

Judith Freeman

Following the success of her short story collection, Family Attractions, Judith Freeman’s 1989 novel Chinchilla Farm was published to critical acclaim. In it, Freeman explores the western landscape, from Utah to Los Angeles to Baja, through the perceptive eyes and pungent voice of her gentle heroine Vera, who is force to reconstruct her own life. Her second novel, Set for Life, will be out next year.

Emily Fridlund

With a thriller’s sense of foreboding and the poetic language of literary fiction, Emily Fridlund’s daring debut novel, History of Wolves, tells an eerily quiet coming of age story. She is a master at describing the natural world and then weaving the elements of place and relationships into an unforgettable tale. A finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, TC Boyle raves it is “as exquisite a first novel as I have ever encountered.”

Fridlund received her MFA in Fiction from Washington University in St. Louis and completed her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at University of Southern California. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

Lisa Fugard

LISA FUGARD’s first novel, Skinner’s Drift, illuminates the complicated relationships and loyalties between blacks and whites in South Africa at the end of the apartheid era. The novel vividly captures the African landscape and the troubled and conflicted personalities who inhabit it. Fugard is the daughter of acclaimed playwright Athol Fugard.

Alexander Fuller

ALEXANDRA FULLER’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is a tender, intensely moving and even delightful journey through a white African girl’s childhood. In wry and sometime hilarious prose, Alexandra Fuller describes an unruly life in an often inhospitable place. Winner of several awards, this tale of terrible beauty soars.