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This wildly imaginative story collection, Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21st Century, mesmerizes readers with original worlds that blur the boundaries of real and fantastic, and confirms Kim Fu as one of the most exciting short story writers in contemporary literature. The twelve unforgettable tales offer surprising insights into human nature while unmasking contradictions that make the strange seem familiar and the familiar feel strange.
Visit Kim Fu’s website ›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.
Visit Lisa Fugard’s website › From 2007 Festival ›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.
From 2004 Festival ›As a matter of fact
Afternoon Session
Betty Harper Fussell, author of Mabel, a biography of Hollywood’s first ‘I-don’t-care’ girl! She is joined by Elaine Kendall for this presentation.
In her first novel, Metropolis, ELIZABETH GAFFNEY, advisory editor of The Paris Review, has placed vividly imagined characters in the brawling, rapidly changing New York City of the post-Civil War era. The Dickensian novel captures the violence and splendor of the emerging modern city, as well as the “luck and misfortune” of its immigrant hero. Gaffney’s short stories have appeared in publications such as North American Review, Mississippi Review and The Reading Room.
Visit Elizabeth Gaffney’s website › From 2006 Festival ›Cristina Garcia lends her rich voice to the chorus of Latina writers whose work brings vitality to modern literature. Critical acclaim accompanied publication of both her novels, Nation Book Award nominee Dreaming in Cuban and her more recent work The Aguero Sisters. Garcia weaves mesmerizing stories of individuals under the powerful influence of Cuban American family life.
Visit Cristina Garcia’s website › From 1999 Festival ›Roxane Gay is the author of the novel The Untamed State, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction; the essay collection Bad Feminist; and Ayiti, a multi-genre collection. She is working on a memoir, Hunger, and a comic book in Marvel’s Black Panther series. Her writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012, The New York Times, the Guardian, and many others. She is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, among other honors.
Visit Roxane Gay’s website › From 2017 Festival ›Elizabeth George lives in Huntington Beach, and is a former high school English teacher. A Great Deliverance, published by Bantam Books, is her debut novel. She has completed her forthcoming, Payment in Blood, and is currently working on the third book in the series, Well Schooled in Murder. Her love affair with England and her precise crafting of psychological suspense combine to make her “whodunits” riveting reading.
Visit Elizabeth George’s website › From 1989 Festival ›Kaye Gibbons’ heart-wrenching first novel, Ellen Foster, received the Sue Kaufman Prize of the American Academy and Institute of the Arts and Letters. Her second, A Virtuous Woman, confirms the promise of this young North Carolina writer’s talent and power. Her unforgettable characters are strong and unflinching in facing lives of “quiet desperation”, in her beautifully crafted stories that have received rave notices from reviewer and readers all over the United States, as well as in England and France.
Visit Kaye Gibbons’s website › From 1990 Festival ›Sandra M. Gilbert crafts fiercely intelligent and beautifully rhythmic poetry. Her critically acclaimed Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 is Gilbert’s sixth book of verse. Also author of a dozen books of literary criticism and a poignant prose memoir, Wrongful Death, Gilbert is perhaps best known as co-editor of the pioneering Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, now in its second edition.
Visit Sandra M. Gilbert’s website › From 2002 Festival ›Gillian Gill’s biographical subjects are quirky, controversial women (Agatha Christie, Mary Baker Eddy, Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria, Colette) who blaze their own paths to achievement. She writes about real women faced with tough choices, not icons frozen in time. Gill brings erudition and narrative momentum to history, with documentary zeal and stylistic sparkle.
From 2012 Festival ›Maria Gillan is an award-winning, Italian-American poet, Director of the Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey, creative writing teacher, and editor of the poetry magazine, Footwork. She has twice read on national Public Radio. Gillan’s first two books are Flowers from the Tree of Night and Winter Light. A third book, The Weather of Old Seasons, is forthcoming. “She created for us a life, her life, to measure our own by.”
Visit Maria Gillan’s website › From 1989 Festival ›JULIA GLASS proved herself a gifted writer with her first novel, the best-seller Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award. Her second, The Whole World Over, is a generous, tentacled, ensemble novel deploying many characters. Her short stories have been honored with three Nelson Algren Awards and the Tobias Wolff Award.
From 2007 Festival ›LISA GLATT’s A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That explores the complex and all-too-human world of Rachel Spark, a thirty-something college instructor, and her wildly life-affirming mother, who has been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. “Far more celebration than wake,” raves Elle magazine, this novel has been widely praised in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review. Lisa Glatt is a Long Beach writer.
Visit Lisa Glatt’s website › From 2005 Festival ›This intelligent and vibrant debut novel was one of the most anticipated releases of 2022. Xochitl Gonzalez seamlessly weaves together a story of complex family dynamics, the history and culture of Puerto Rico, gentrification, and how the American dream of wealth and fame doesn’t necessarily lead to personal happiness. Olga Dies Dreaming is a thought-provoking story that leads the reader to ask, “What exactly is the American dream?”
Visit Xochitl Gonzalez’s website › From 2023 Festival ›Among her many accomplishments, historian LINDA GORDON received the 2010 Bancroft Prize in American history and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for her book, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. The Los Angeles Times calls it a “superbly written biographical documentary.” Linda Gordon is the Florence Kelley professor of history at NYU. She has won many prestigious awards, including Guggenheim, National Endowment for Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Radcliffe Institute fellowships.
Visit Linda Gordon’s website › From 2011 Festival ›A summer spent as a volunteer in an Indian orphanage led Shilpi Somaya Gowda to write her first novel, Secret Daughter. Born and raised in Toronto to parents who emigrated from Mumbai, Shilpi weaves together both American and Indian cultures in a gripping exploration of family and motherhood. She currently lives in California with her husband and children.
Visit Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s website › From 2012 Festival ›Sue Grafton’s private eye Kinsey Milhone, strong, brave, independent, caring, and funny, stars in her own alphabet: A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, C is for Corpse, D is for Deadbeat, E is for Evidence, F is for Fugitive and, due next May G is for Gumshoe. When the alphabet has been used up, fans hope Sue will number her books to infinity.
Visit Sue Grafton’s website › From 1990 Festival ›SUZANNE GREENBERG’s short story collection Speed-Walk and Other Stories has been praised as “the work of a confident, strong, and utterly unique writer.” With gracefully simple prose, Greenberg creates characters that are at once eccentric and familiar. This debut volume was the 2003 winner of the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
Visit Suzanne Greenberg’s website › From 2004 Festival ›LINDA GREGERSON’s luminous third book of poetry, Waterborne, recently won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and her 1996 volume, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, was a finalist for both the Poets Prize and the Lenore Marshall Award. A former actress with the experimental theater company Karken and staff editor at The Atlantic Monthly. Gregerson is also a specialist in English Renaissance literature.
Visit Linda Gregerson’s website › From 2004 Festival ›JENNIFER HAIGH is the author of both The New York Times bestseller and award-winning Baker Towers, and Mrs. Kimble, which won the Pen/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Haigh creates rich character sketches, drawing the reader into the interwoven lives of families and making her books difficult to put down. She has published numerous short stories, and her latest novel is The Condition.
Visit Jennifer Haigh’s website › From 2011 Festival ›Becoming a Writer
Our luncheon speaker is Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, author of the enormously popular A Woman of Independent Means (the basis for a major motion picture starring Jill Clayburgh) and Life Sentences, discussing her personal writing evolution.
Los Angeles Times: “At an age when far too many people are writing far too much about far too little and usually doing it badly, a novel comes along to restore our faith in language and good conscience.”
Shirlee Taylor Haizlip presents an eloquent and sensitive family memoir in The Sweeter the Juice. Daughter of a black minister and a woman of mixed race, Haizlip chronicles the pain of searching for the relatives who abandoned her mother in childhood so they could “pass” for white. A gifted speaker, the author invites us to rethink the meaning of race. Featured on Oprah Winfrey, Haislip and her family attracted one of the five largest audiences in the show’s history.
From 1995 Festival ›In a stunning novel based on the life of Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, Louisa Hall crafts a series of narratives that explore the ability of the human mind to believe what it wants, measuring public and private tragedy and weighing power and guilt. Trinity asks searing questions that challenge our notion of what it means to truly know someone and reveals the secrets we keep from the world and from ourselves.
Purchase from Creating Conversations › Visit Louisa Hall’s website › From 2020 Festival ›LYN HAMILTON is the author of a successful series of archaeological mysteries featuring antique dealer Lara McClintoch. Each of the well-researched books is set in a different exotic locale and draws upon the past in an unusual way. The seventh, The Thai Amulet, was published in April 2003, and the fourth, The Celtic Riddle, was the basis of the May 2003 Murder, She Wrote TV movie starring Angela Landsbury.
Visit Lyn Hamilton’s website › From 2004 Festival ›