CSULB Mystery-Cult

Whodunits? The women do it well!

Afternoon Session
Eileen Lothamer, PhD, in Victorian Literature along with co-conspirator Louise Lubbe, Professor of English, emeritus, discuss the women writers of the genre.

Rita Nachtmann

Rita Nachtmann grew up in Illinois, graduated from NYU, acted and wrote in Chicago and New York City, and now lives in California, teaching dramatic writing at UCLA. Her eight plays include, How I Spent My Life’s Vacation (Pen West Award), Mama Drama and A Shiksa in Boca Raton, plus numerous one-acts and screenplays. Nachtmann adroitly pokes fun at the pretentious, and investigates life’s daily drama.

Gina B. Nahai

GINA B. NAHAI has written three novels including Cry of the Peacock, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, which was number one on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Her most recent work, Sunday’s Silence, sets its story in Appalachia and “expands Nahai’s fictional universe in new and curiously fitting directions.” (Publishers Weekly)

Ann Napolitano

The brilliantly crafted Hello Beautiful, by New York Times bestselling author Ann Napolitano, is a profoundly moving portrait of the Padavano sisters and the young man who marries into the family. When the darkness from his past surfaces, it results in a family rift that changes their lives. Selected as Oprah Winfrey’s 100th book club pick, Hello Beautiful vibrates with tenderness as it explores family, ambition, expectation, love and forgiveness.

Sena Jeter Naslund

Inspired by a brief passage in Moby Dick, Sena Jeter Naslund created Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star Gazer, This uplifting story of one women’s spiritual journey was selected as on of the top five novels of 1999 by Time magazine. Naslund is also the author of the novel, Sherlock in Love, and the short story collection, The Disobedience of Water.

Gloria Naylor

1983 American Book Award Winner

Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place, an outstanding first novel “in seven stories.”

Sonia Nazario

SONIA NAZARIO won the Pulitzer Prize for her Los Angeles Times story of a boy’s dangerous journey to join his mother in the United States. Expanded with new research, Enrique’s Journey “is a timely and riveting narrative of the dangerous journey undertaken to make a broken family whole.*

Nana Nkweti

This impressive debut collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells, offers ten original stories that are heartbreaking, satirical, and laugh-out-loud funny. Nana Nkweti writes stories across a variety of genres on very different subjects. From a Comic Con Convention in New York to a difficult birthing in a Cameroonian village, these stories are filled with unforgettable characters etched in impeccable prose.

Frances Khirallah Noble

Frances Khirallah Nobles’s short story collection The Situe Stories, appeared for five weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestsellers list. Noble is working on a novel and is completing a nonfiction work tentatively titled, Alley Flowers.

Idra Novey

Prose that reads like poetry with the tempo of a fast paced thriller, this debut novel from Idra Novey was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was called a “tour de force” by Kirkus Review. Ways to Disappear is a meditation on how we choose to appear and disappear to each other. Both an accomplished poet and translator in Spanish and Portuguese, Novey has been published in eight languages.

Sigrid Nunez

SIGRID NUNEZ is the author of four novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God and For Rouenna. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize in Literature and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Her latest novel, The Last of Her Kind, examines the intense and difficult friendship between two college roommates.

Elizabeth Nyamayaro

Award winning humanitarian Elizabeth Nyamayaro’s memoir unfolds from a near-death experience and her silent vow to dedicate her life to helping others, to a courageous and determined quest to fulfill that vow. At the age of eight a severe draught struck Elizabeth’s village in Zimbabwe leaving her unable to move from hunger. A United Nations aid worker gave her a bowl of porridge that saved her life and inspired her dream.

Nuala O'Faolain

NUALA O’FAOLAIN, born in County Dublin, reared by an alcoholic mother and a remote father, published as her first book a memoir, Are You Somebody? Next, a novel, My Dream of You, continued her examination of lives that are a constant struggle for emotional growth in the face of pain and midlife disappointment. Almost There, a recent memoir, continues that journey.

Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Dept. of Speculation (2014) and Last Things (2000), which was chosen as Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times First Book Award. She is also the author of children’s books and has contributed to several anthologies. She teaches in the writing programs at Queens University, Brooklyn College and Columbia.

Aline Ohanesian

In Orhan’s Inheritance, Aline Ohanesian’s debut novel, a family mystery unravels to expose roots in the Armenian genocide and diaspora. The novel has been recognized as a top book selection by Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and it was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ohanesian, a descendant of genocide survivors, lives in Orange County, California, with her husband and two young sons.

Sharon Olds

What an honor to have with us the current New York State Poet Laureate, Sharon Olds! Often compared to both Plath and Sexton, Olds is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry, most recently, Blood, Tin, Straw. This widely anthologized winner of numerous awards and grants teaches graduate writers at NYU, and severely physically challenged writers at a state hospital.

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen, whose profound writing has earned her national literary awards and lectureships at leading universities, is said to have contributed a new form to American fiction with her classic Tell Me a Riddle. Her non-fiction work, Silences, inspired by a life of work and poverty, confronts the crucial relationships between circumstances and creativity. Yonnondio: From the Thirties was begun during the Great Depression, but not published until 1974.

Susan Orlean

After graduating from the University of Michigan, Susan Orlean worked as a newspaper journalist. She became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1992. Her books range from the bestselling The Orchid Thief, used to great effect in the film “Adaptation,” to a book documenting the astonishing fame and fortune of a canine named Rin Tin Tin.

Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, is about a group of young Japanese “picture brides” who sailed to America in the early 1900s. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Awards, it was described by Booklist as “entrancing, appalling, and heartbreakingly beautiful.” A California native, Otsuka lives in New York City, and writes every afternoon in her neighborhood café.

Whitney Otto

Whitney Otto wrote her first novel, How to Make An American Quilt, in 1991. This highly original, intelligent and insightful work of fiction intersperses information about the history of quilting with the stories of a group of women living in a mythical town in California’s Central Valley. This patchwork approach affords the reader a rich experience in which the characters share their individuality as well as their complex relationships.

Delia Owens

Where The Crawdads Sing is at once an ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising courtroom drama. Through the eyes of a young girl abandoned by her family and left to virtually raise herself in the isolation of the North Carolina marshland, this debut novel by Delia Owens explores the stubborn wildness that resides in all of us and examines the deeply human instincts that bind us to other people.

Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki educates as she entertains in her novel, My Year of Meats, deftly and humorously weaving the stories of Jane, a young Japanese-American woman hired to select ideal American families to be filmed creating tasty meat dishes, and Akiko, a Japanese wife who watches on Japanese television the programs that are intended to encourage the Japanese consumption of more meat.

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.