Karissa Chen

In her debut novel, Homeseeking, Karissa Chen delivers an epic tale of love, loss, and longing shaped by the Chinese diaspora. The novel follows the lives of Suchi and Haiwen, a couple separated by history and circumstance, through a compelling dual narrative structure—Suchi’s story unfolds chronologically forward, while Haiwen’s moves in reverse. This innovative approach offers a profound exploration of their dreams for the future and the weight of their past decisions.

Barbara Demick

American journalist Barbara Demick’s latest work, Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: From China to America, a True Story, is narrative non-fiction at its best. She brings China’s one-child policy to life with the heartfelt story of twin sisters separated at birth: one growing up in China with her mother, the other with her adoptive family in Texas. She expertly combines rich characters, a thought-provoking subject, and historical facts to produce a gripping and engaging read you will not soon forget.

Claire Hoffman

In Sister, Sinner, author and journalist Claire Hoffman masterfully brings to life the spectacular and intriguing tale of Aimee Semple McPherson, a celebrity evangelist who built a megachurch in Los Angeles in the early part of the 20th century which spread nationally and globally and remains in existence today. Punctuated by family, love, mystery, death, passion, scandal, and politics, this historical biography details McPherson’s vast sphere of influence driven by the power of belief.

Amanda Peters

Written before her award-winning debut novel, The Berry Pickers, Amanda Peters called this collection of short stories “her writing training wheels.” Peters’s stories are deeply rooted in the 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. Waiting for the Long Night Moon offers a glimpse into the creative brain of a gifted storyteller.

Anamely Salgado Reyes

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.

Nayantara Roy

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.

Rufi Thorpe

Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a bold, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartwarming story about one young woman’s attempt to navigate adulthood, new motherhood, and her meager bank account in our increasingly online world. Rufi Thorpe has created a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine in a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative.

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.

Marcela Fuentes

Set in a fictional Texas town on the U.S.– Mexico border, the memorable debut novel, Malas, links the stories of two women: Pilar a young wife and mother in the 1950s and Lulu a 14-year-old in 1994. Fuentes creates a vibrant portrait of these two strong women who are considered mala, bad and willful, by those around them. When Pilar crashes the funeral of young Lulu’s grandmother, Lulu’s curiosity about the glamorous stranger leads to their unlikely friendship.

Emily Habeck

The unforgettable, even wild story, Shark Heart: A Love Story, is set in an alternative world where human-to-animal mutations are a medical reality. In this oddly heartwarming tale of a newly married couple, Lewis and Wren are faced with a tragic diagnosis: Lewis is mutating into the largest predator on earth – the great white shark. Emily Habeck’s daring debut novel marks the arrival of a talented new writer of “originality, humor, and heart.”

Lara Love Hardin

New York Times Bestselling Author Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict, to jailhouse shot caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter for Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama in this harrowing, no-holds-barred memoir The Many Lives of Mama Love. A heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that made it almost impossible for her to move beyond the worst thing she had ever done.

Patti Callahan Henry

In The Secret Book of Flora Lea by bestselling author Patti Callahan Henry, a young woman discovers a rare book that reopens the most shattering event of her life: the disappearance of her younger sister from a countryside village where they were evacuated to during the London Blitz of World War II. When Hazel seeks the truth, she is met by guarded responses. Across a generation of war survivors, this compelling novel explores family, fear, loss, love, forgiveness, and captures the essence of sisterhood.

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.

Kate Zernike

In The Exceptions, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kate Zernike unveils the compelling story of sixteen trailblazing female scientists at MIT who exposed systemic sexism within the institution, sparking a national reckoning in the world of science. Centering on Nancy Hopkins, a reluctant feminist and leader among her peers, this powerful nonfiction account chronicles a battle against decades of discrimination. Zernike’s meticulous reporting sheds light on the subtle, persistent biases faced by women in academia.

Lily Brooks-Dalton

Richly described and devastatingly more fact than fiction, The Light Pirate illustrates a world where the earth has taken control in order to either heal or implode. It is here we meet Wanda, a girl “born at exactly the wrong time, under exactly the wrong circumstances, given exactly the wrong name” whose resilience in the face of environmental and personal tragedy is inspiring. Her actions provide a snapshot of a lifestyle we may be forced to reckon with—soon.

Diane Marie Brown

In a spellbinding debut, local author Diane Marie Brown explores generational trauma and the beautiful, conflicted relationship between mothers and daughters. Victoria wants to protect her family but must decide how far to go and how much to reveal. Spanning four generations, 1,900 miles, and dozens of secrets, Black Candle Women keeps the reader guessing as it explores the line between magic and manifestation.

Kim Fu

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.

Rebecca Makkai

—I Have Some Questions for You— The latest novel from award-winning author Rebecca Makkai, is a page-turning murder mystery. Unsettling and riveting, the story revolves around successful film professor and podcaster Bodie Kane who is unable to let go of the past, particularly the drowning death of her high school roommate. It is a literary whodunit that begs important questions about what is right, what is wrong, and what is truth.

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.

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.

Shelby Van Pelt

With wit and charm, Shelby Van Pelt’s luminous debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, explores the unlikely friendship of a widow and a giant Pacific Octopus. After her husband dies, Tova begins working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium where she encounters curmudgeonly Marcellus. In the midst of this remarkable friendship the mysterious past of two young men begins to unfold, untangle, and ultimately offer a future that once seemed impossible.

Aamina Ahmad

Profoundly intimate and propulsive, The Return of Faraz Ali is a spellbindingly assured first novel that poses a timeless question: Whom do we choose to protect, and at what price? Aamina Ahmad sets her expertly crafted tale in the labyrinthine alleyways of the notorious red-light district of Lahore, Pakistan, where an investigator sent to hush up the violent murder of a young girl finds himself reckoning with his past.

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.”

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.

Xochitl Gonzalez

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?”

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.

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.

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.

Alexandra Andrews

With its sharp twists and diabolical turns, Who is Maud Dixon? is a clever and stylish debut novel from journalist Alexandra Andrews. Set in beautiful Morocco, Andrews explores the dark sides of ambition, greed, and identity. Through her complex, often cunning characters, she skillfully captures her audience in this irresistible thriller that delivers on its promise to be “one of the most anticipated books of 2021.”

Kendra Atleework

Blending family memories and environmental history, Miracle Country: A Memoir of a Family and a Landscape is a powerful debut from Kendra Atleework. With shimmering prose she weaves the threads of her bittersweet relationship with family and home, her upbringing in Swall Meadows near the town of Bishop, and the tragic environmental history of this region. It is a captivating California story told in exquisite detail with a tender hand.

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.

Ladee Hubbard

In Ladee Hubbard’s imaginative and engrossing second novel, The Rib King, the reader is dropped into the circa 1914 daily whirl of Black servants in a fading, but well-to-do household. The escapades of these hardworking, innovative people create a suspenseful page turner as a network of interests compete to take advantage of them. This illuminating examination of a troubled period sheds light on those who thrive despite prevalent racism.

Megha Majumdar

In her incendiary debut novel, A Burning, Megha Majumdar writes a gripping thriller with the force of an epic…“taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting.” Presenting its contemporary Indian characters with prismatic portraiture, it demonstrates the consequences of limited choices, hopes and dreams available to people living on the margins. This is a novel of our pandemic times, an exploration of precarity in all its forms, as funny as it is sad.

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.

Dorothy Wickenden

From the intimate perspective of three friends and neighbors—the “agitators” of the title—acclaimed author Dorothy Wickenden tells the fascinating stories of abolition, the Underground Railroad, the early women’s rights movement, and the Civil War. These crucial American stories are enriched by glimpsing them through the friendship of these exceptional women who spent decades violating the laws and conventions of their time.

Casey Cep

Offering a deeply moving portrait of Harper Lee, one of the country’s most beloved writers, Furious Hours also tells the story of Reverend Willie Maxwell, a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members to collect the insurance money. Lee attempted to capture the shocking murders, courtroom drama, and racial politics of the Deep South yet ultimately abandoned the project. Casey Cep brings these two stories to life.

Catherine Chung

The Tenth Muse is a sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free. This impressive second novel from Catherine Chung interweaves myths and legends, both intellectual and familial, that grip the reader from start to finish. It captures a moment in time when the world was different but eerily echoes present-day struggles of race, gender, and how we belong in the world.

Louisa Hall

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.

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.

Madhuri Vijay

In her debut novel, The Far Field, Madhuri Vijay follows a young Indian woman on an odyssey for a lost figure from her childhood to seek resolution of uncertainties about her deceased mother. It is a journey that takes her from her privileged life in Southern India to a remote Himalayan village in the troubled region of Kashmir; and unwittingly, to the brink of a devastating political and personal reckoning.

Karen Thompson Walker

An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from bestselling author Karen Thomas Walker. Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—in our waking days and, perhaps even more, in our dreams.

Elaine Weiss

Nashville, August 1920. It is the last stand for the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote; Tennessee, the best hope for the final vote needed to ratify the amendment, becomes the battleground. In her book, The Woman’s Hour, Elaine Weiss tells the dramatic story of the vicious political battle waged that hot summer between the suffragists and their fierce opponents. Intrigue, bribery, betrayals and bigotry abound.

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.

Attica Locke

Written with power and grace, Bluebird, Bluebird is a heartbreaking thriller about racial tensions in a small East Texas town where conflicting emotions of love and justice intersect. Winner of the Edgar Award for best novel, it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Attica Locke has authored several prize winners: Pleasantville, Harper Lee Prize; The Cutting Season, Ernest Gaines Award; and Black Water Rising, Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Deborah Campbell

A Disappearance in Damascus is the gripping story of two brave women—a journalist and her Iraqi translator—and what happened when everything went wrong during their work together in Syria. This extraordinarily affecting account…memoir, history and mystery story… won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize and is now optioned for film and TV. Deborah Campbell has written for numerous publications and has won three National Magazine Awards.

Leni Zumas

A provocative dystopian novel, Red Clocks details a fictional future that feels eerily predictable in the present day female experience. Weaving together stories of four women whose lives are negatively impacted by repressive laws, the plot brilliantly engages and enrages the reader. Leni Zumas’ imaginative novel has been featured in many of 2018’s “Best of” lists: Amazon’s Best Book of the Month, New York Times Editor’s Choice, and Time Magazine Best Novels of the Year.

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.

Rachel Kadish

A sophisticated work of historical fiction, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two remarkable women separated by centuries, that centers on a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents. This literary intrigue, filled with memorable characters, is both electrifying and intimate in tone, and received the 2017 National Jewish Book Award. Rachel Kadish’s previous novels are, From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story.

Amy Bloom

With an acute understanding of human nature, forged by twenty years as a psychotherapist, Amy Bloom explores the unexpected affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok in her novel White Houses. This forbidden affair was an open secret, as was FDR’s affair with his secretary Missy Le Hand. Bloom is a New York Times bestselling author who has been hailed as “one of America’s unique and most gifted literary voices” by Colum McCann.

Tayari Jones

An American Marriage is the story of newlyweds - a young African-American golden couple poised for success – who are torn apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. It is at heart a love story that looks deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward with hope and conviction. Tayari Jones has authored three other novels, Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow.

Eowyn Ivey

Gifted storyteller Eowyn Ivey’s newest work, To the Bright Edge of the World, is a haunting historical novel about an 1885 wilderness expedition into Alaska’s Northern interior. It is a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, a Library Journal Top 10 Book of 2016, was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, and was awarded the 2017 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

Her debut novel, The Snow Child, was an international bestseller published in more than 25 languages and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Eowyn’s essays and short fiction have appeared in London’s Observer Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Alaska Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and the North Pacific Rim literary journal Cirque. She lives with her family in Alaska

Nathalia Holt

Author Nathalia Holt’s recent book, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars, relates the illuminating story of the young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, and launched America into space. This work follows her previous book, Cured: The People Who Defeated HIV.

Both author and science journalist, her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Time, and Popular Science. She is a former fellow at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard University. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Boston, MA.

Tilar J. Mazzeo

In her compelling World War II story, Irena’s Children, Tilar J. Mazzeo captures the extraordinary courage of Irena Sendler; a Polish social worker who was granted full access to the Warsaw ghetto. Her compassion for the plight of trapped Jewish families led Irena to create a network of individuals who took enormous personal risks to smuggle over 2500 Jewish children past the Nazis.

Mazzeo is the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College and the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times bestselling author of numerous works of narrative nonfiction. She divides her time among coastal Maine, New York City, and Saanichton, British Columbia, where she lives with her husband at Parsell Vineyard.

Lesley Nneka Arimah

Lesley Nneka Arimah, born in England of Nigerian parents, has lived in Africa and the United States where she received her BA degree from Florida State University and an MFA from Minnesota State University. She was recently short-listed for the prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing.

What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky, is a debut work of short stories whose memorable characters are trapped in heartbreaking situations with a moral dilemma that requires more thought and attention than a single reading can supply.

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.

Elsa Hart

Elsa Hart’s beautiful writing seems inspired by the years she has lived abroad. Her first book, Jade Dragon Mountain, an acclaimed mystery novel, is set in Southwest China. Its sequel, The White Mirror, follows the humble librarian, Li Du, as he journeys near the border of Tibet and becomes entangled in yet another mystery. Hart’s writing is smart, full of historical and cultural references.

Born in Rome, where her father was a foreign correspondent, Hart moved to Moscow when she was two. Since then, she has lived in the Czech Republic, the U.S., and China. Her third novel to be published in 2018, continues to explore the power of narrative to shape story and empires.

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.

Lily King

Award-winning author Lily King’s recent bestseller, Euphoria, received both the Kirkus Prize and New England Award for Fiction. Many publications listed it as a Best Book of the Year, including the New York Times Book Review. King’s brilliant novel, inspired by an incident in Margaret Mead’s life, charts the path of three anthropologists isolated in remote New Guinea as their relationship unravels due to their rivaling scientific careers and the drum beat of sexual tension between them. This is King’s fourth award winning novel.

Mia Alvar

Mia Alvar has written nine eye-opening and unforgettable short stories in her award winning debut novel, In The Country. The “country” in the title is the Philippines, and the stories focus on Filipinos uprooted from their homeland. Each story explores changes, loss and the desire to stay connected. Alvar’s writing is deeply compassionate and richly felt.

Roxane Gay

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.

Nadia Hashimi

Set in Afghanistan, When The Moon Is Low follows Fereiba as she finally discovers love and fulfillment, only to have it threatened when the Talilban assume power. Fereiba and her family are forced to escape the country, throwing them into the nightmarish world of illegal immigration. Nadia Hashimi’s haunting novel is worthy of the praise and starred reviews it has received.

Jill Leovy

After ten years embedded with the homicide detectives of the LAPD, Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy shines a new light on an old situation; the epidemic of black on black violence in South Central Los Angeles. Ghettoside is a thought provoking book that challenges assumptions about ‘gang-related’ violence. Winner of numerous awards, including the 2016 Ridenhour Book Prize which recognizes “acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society.”

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.

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.

Karen Abbott

Karen Abbott is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City, American Rose, and, most recently, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, named one of the best books of 2014 by Library Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, Amazon, and Flavorwire, and optioned by Sony for a miniseries. A native of Philadelphia, she now lives in New York City, where she’s at work on her next book.

J. A. Jance

J. A. JANCE is a New York Times bestselling author of over 50 books. Before becoming a published author, however, she was a school librarian, a teacher and an insurance sales woman. Jance creates characters you care about, from J.P. Beaumont, a Pacific Northwest homicide detective, to Joanna Brady, an Arizona sheriff. Her most recently released mystery is Cold Betrayal. Born in South Dakota, raised in Arizona, she now divides her time between Seattle and Tucson.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jean Hanff Korelitz is a prolific writer in several genres. Her essays have appeared in Vogue and Newsweek. One of her novels, Admission, was made into a popular movie, and she has authored novels for children as well as a book of poems. Her most recent novel, You Should Have Known, is an absorbing literary mystery. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge, she currently lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.

Maya Lang

Written for “readers who never made it through Ulysses (or haven’t wanted to try),” The Sixteenth of June, Maya Lang’s debut novel, is a finely observed, wry social satire set in Philadelphia over the course of a single day, and a nod to James Joyce’s celebrated classic. Maya holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and was awarded the 2012 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholarship in Fiction.

Jami Attenberg

Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best selling author of five novels including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, technology and food to numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and Elle. She divides her time between New Orleans and Brooklyn.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Novelist and short story writer, Bonnie Jo Campbell, released her latest story collection, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, this past fall. Her previous collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for both the National Book Award and National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Campbell was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011 and teaches fiction at Pacific University. She lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo, Michigan.

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.

Aimee Bender

Known for her imaginative prose, Aimee Bender has published three short story collections and two novels. Her most recent book, The Color Master, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2013. Bender’s award-winning short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, GQ and Harper’s. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches creative writing at USC.

Kate Christensen

Kate Christensen is the author of six novels, including The Epicure’s Lament, the PEN/Faulkner award-winning The Great Man, and The Astral. Her most recent book, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites, pairs a personal and social history with a passion for the culinary arts. Her essays, reviews and stories have appeared in Bookforum, The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal.

Jennifer Clement

Jennifer Clement is the author of many books including Widow Basquiat, the acclaimed memoir of Jean Michel Basquiat. Her recent novel, Prayers for the Stolen, is a portrait of how the drug trade in Mexico has affected women. The book won an NEA fellowship and the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award and has been published all over the world to the highest praise.

Sloane Crosley

Sloane Crosley is a witty, urbane and madcap new voice in American letters. Sloane’s first book, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, was nominated for the Thurber Prize for best humor in America. Her follow-up, How Did You Get This Number, is a collection of fun and zany essays.

Cristina Henriquez

A love story, as well as a tribute to the modern-day immigrant experience, The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez’s third book, is a novel that the San Francisco Chronicle says “can both make you think and break your heart.” Cristina’s fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and other publications. She lives in Illinois.

Eleanor Morse

Eleanor Morse’s novel, White Dog Fell from the Sky, drawn from her time in Botswana in the 1970’s, is a compelling story of friendship between two displaced characters: Isaac, a South African fleeing apartheid, and Alice, an American expatriate. Morse lives in Maine and won several regional book awards for her earlier novel, An Unexpected Forest.

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.

Karen Connelly

Karen Connelly is an award-winning author of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her novel, The Lizard Cage, was shaped by her immersion in the political struggles of Burma, and she explored the lives of Burmese rebels in her nonfiction work, Burmese Lessons. Her poetry collection, Come Cold River, was released last fall.

Amanda Coplin

Writing with breathtaking precision and empathy, Amanda Coplin has crafted an astonishing debut novel, The Orchardist, about a man who disrupts the lonely harmony of an ordered life when he opens his heart and lets the world in. Recipient of the 2012 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award,Coplin lives in Portland, Oregon.

Kristiana Kahakauwila

Kristiana Kahakauwila, a native Hawaiian,earned a BA from Princeton and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She wrote and edited forWine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado, and is now an assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University. Kristiana’s debut short story collection, This Is Paradise, captures the grit and glory of modern Hawaii.

Denise Kiernan

In her most recent book, The Girls of Atomic City, Denise Kiernan traces the story of the women who worked on the Manhattan Project, who unknowingly helped to create fuel for the world’s first atomic bomb. A journalist, producer, and author, Denise’s work has appeared inThe New York Times as well as many other national publications.

Becky Masterman

Becky Masterman’s debut thriller, Rage Against the Dying, captured worldwide attention with her smart and compassionate heroine, Brigid Quinn. Aging, but no MissMarple, this woman can still take down a mugger. The story is fast-paced fun throughout; a book you won’t want to put down.

Madeline Miller

A story of love and adventure that vividly conjures the world of ancient Greek myths, Madeline Miller’s debut novel, The Song of Achilles, won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. When she’s not writing, Madeline teaches Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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.

Megan Mayhew Bergman

Unforgettable characters pop to life in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s first collection of short stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise. The book earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and raves from many quarters. No experience seems to have escaped the author’s eagle eye as she twists even the most mundane into something special.

Eleanor Brown

The sisters in Eleanor Brown’s entertaining and engaging new novel, The Weird Sisters, had an unusual upbringing, listening to their professor father speak primarily in Shakespearean verse. Brown’s novel focuses on what happens when the adult sisters gather to care for their sick mother. Their “weirdness” is explored with humor, compassion, and poignancy. In true Shakespearean fashion, all’s well that ends well.

Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven is the award-winning author of three novels. Her latest, Blame, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and deals with the issues of guilt, redemption, and the painful soul-searching that results from the aftermath of a deadly alcohol-fueled accident that caused a double homicide. She also wrote Jamesland and Roundrock.

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.

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.

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.

Amy Waldman

In The Submission, a finalist in the Hemingway Foundation/PEN First Fiction Award, Amy Waldman creates a fascinating look at the jury’s selection in an anonymous competition for the 911 memorial. A Muslim-American wins and the jury goes into a tailspin. Waldman eloquently considers the multiple issues that spring from this event.

Lan Samantha Chang

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a story collection, Hunger, and two novels, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost and Inheritance. She has taught fiction writing at Stanford, Harvard, and the MFA Program for Writing at Warren Wilson College. Chang is the director of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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.

Haley Tanner

Haley Tanner’s breakout novel, Vaclav & Lena, is a magical story about the strength and endurance of love. Her poignant tale of two Russian immigrant children who meet in an ESL class in Brooklyn will steal your heart as you follow the story of these unforgettable protagonists, the endearing budding magician, Vaclav, and his “lovely assistant,” Lena.

Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews’ recently released novel, Irma Voth, explores the inner life of a young woman living in an isolated Mennonite community. It is a similar theme to her award-winning novel A Complicated Kindness. Miriam’s other works are The Flying Troutmans, a novel that affirms the bonds of family; and Swing Low: A Life, a moving memoir about her manic-depressive father.

Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, is an epic narrative focusing on the lives of three African Americans who represent the stories of millions who migrated from the South from 1915 to 1970. A major part of American history, this great migration has been called the most underrated story of the 20th century.

Gillian Gill

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.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda

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.

Rae Armantrout

Honored poet RAE ARMANTROUT’s eleventh book, Money Shot, was released this January to critical acclaim. Armantrout won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for her thought-provoking book, Versed. She has been referred to as “the laureate of the everyday or uncanny,” and her work has been widely anthologized. She is a professor of writing and literature at UCSD.

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.

Linda Gordon

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.

Jennifer Haigh

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jane Hamilton

A native of the Midwest, JANE HAMILTON “writes with affection and insight about the darker side of apparently ordinary Midwestern folks.” In her six novels, including the bestselling A Map of the World, Hamilton writes with empathetic humor about the tragedies that bind families and the human ability to rebound from disastrous choices. Her latest novel is Laura Rider’s Masterpiece, a satire.

Kay Redfield Jamison

KAY REDFIELD JAMISON is an internationally acclaimed professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 1995 she published her groundbreaking and exquisitely wrought memoir, An Unquiet Mind which chronicles her struggle with bipolar disorder. Other bestselling works include, Night Falls Fast and Touched With Fire. Her latest book, Nothing Was the Same, has just been released.

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.

Jincy Willet

JINCY WILLETT is a Southern California author living in Escondido. Her novel, The Writing Class is a clever mystery set in a writing class comprised of adult students with varying degrees of writing ability. The reader learns a lot about the craft of writing while laughing at the hilarious situations and wry, witty writing. Willett’s other books include Winner of the National Book Award and Jenny and the Jaws of Life.

Padma Viswanathan

PADMA VISWANATHAN’s bestselling debut novel The Toss of a Lemon, was inspired by family history. It takes the reader into the private world of a Brahmin clan in early twentieth century India, a turbulent time of social and political change. At the novel’s heart is Sivakami, a young widow bound by rigorous rules, which she observes – with the exception of a single defiant act.

Elizabeth Strout

ELIZABETH STROUT is the author of three novels: Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, Abide With Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick, and her latest book, the wonderfully rich and unforgettable, Olive Kitteridge. Her short stories have been published in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Annie Barrows

When first-time author, Mary Ann Shaffer became too ill to finish her novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, she asked her niece ANNIE BARROWS to step in. The epistolary novel tells the story of a reporter in Post-World War II London who corresponds with a group of quirky Guernsey islanders. Ms. Barrows is also the author of the Ivy and Bean series of children’s books.

Nancy Horan

NANCY HORAN’s bestselling debut novel, Loving Frank, delves into the life of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his relationship with Mamah Borthwick Cheney during the years 1907 to 1914. The novel is based on seven years of meticulous research. Horan beautifully blends fact and fiction garnering widespread praise from critics and readers.

Hillary Jordan

HILLARY JORDAN is the author of Mudbound, a first novel that won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded to a debut novel that addresses issues of social justice. She has been featured in the Discover Great New Writers program at Barnes & Noble. Hilary grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

Margot Livesey

MARGOT LIVESEY grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands, and is the author of a collection of stories and six novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture and most recently The House On Fortune Street. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. She is currently a writer in residence at Emerson College in Boston.

Honor Moore

HONOR MOORE has received many awards for her poetry and her playwriting. Her memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, is a beautiful portrait of her illustrious father, an Episcopal priest, who became an activist bishop in Washington, D.C. and New York. It engages the reader in the great issues of American life: war, race, family sexuality and faith.

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.

Andrea Barrett

ANDREA BARRETT is the author of six novels and two collections of short fiction, Ship Fever, which received the National Book Award, and Servants of the Map, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A MacArthur fellow, she’s also received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. She currently teaches at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Geraldine Brooks

GERALDINE BROOKS is the author of the novel March, which received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her novel, People of the Book, is scheduled for release January 2008. She is also the author of Year of Wonders, Nine Parts of Desire and Correspondent. Brooks was correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia and the Middle East.

Bo Caldwell

BO CALDWELL’s debut novel, The Distant Land of My Father, details a journey to the magical land of the narrator’s childhood, Shanghai prior to the Japanese invasion. Selected as a Los Angeles Times Best Book 2002, the fictional memoir explores the themes of betrayal and forgiveness and the enduring love between a parent and child.

Susan Tyler Hitchcock

SUSAN TYLER HITCHOCK, author of the recently published Frankenstein: A Cultural History is a prolific non-fiction writer and editor. She has written professionally for more than 30 years, contributing to newspapers, magazines and essay anthologies as well as writing her own books, including Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London and Gather Ye Wild Things: A Forager’s Year.

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.

Meg Wolitzer

MEG WOLITZER has published seven novels, including The Position, which was long-listed for the UK’s Orange Prize, The Wife and Surrender; Dorothy. She has taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Skidmore College, Columbia University and 92nd Street Y of New York City. Her new novel, The Ten-Year Nap, will be published in March.

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.

Julia Glass

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.

Candice Millard

CANDICE MILLARD has moved from being editor at National Geographic to becoming author of The River of Doubt, an engrossing account of the psyches of two men, Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit, as they complete their death-defying journey through uncharted tributaries of the Amazon River. Millard reveals both history and character with clarity and authority.

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.*

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.

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.

Jacqueline Winspear

JACQUELINE WINSPEAR is the author of the award-winning Maisie Dobbs series. Maisie is a one-of-a-kind psychological investigator who has captured the attention of mystery lovers and history buffs alike. In the fourth installment, Messenger of Truth, Winspear explores both the sinister aspects of the London art world and the bitter legacy of World War I.

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.

Elizabeth Gaffney

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.

Laura Hillman

LAURA HILLMAN’s I Will Plant You A Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler’s List Survivor is an account of her harrowing odyssey through eight concentration camps during World War II. Told in plain, clear prose, it is a story of astonishing power and of “keeping courage and hope and love alive in the harshest of times.”

Alison McGhee

ALISON MCGHEE writes novels about love and loss, connection and disintegration, friendship and alienation and these stories are told in such a distinctive voice that the reader becomes submerged in the characters’ lives. She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Shadow Baby. Her other works include Was It Beautiful?, Rainlight and All Rivers Flow to the Sea, as well as award-winning books for children.

Mary McCarry Morris

MARY MCCARRY MORRIS has been recognized as one of the most superb storytellers of our time and has been compared to John Steinbeck and Carson McCullers. Her first novel, Vanished, was nominated for both PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award. Songs in Ordinary Time was an Oprah Book Club pick and critics cited her latest, The Lost Mother, as Morris’ strongest novel to date.

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.

Lynne Cox

LYNNE COX is a local celebrity – a long distance swimmer who lives in Los Alamitos, California. Her memoir, Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer is about her many incredible swims and her relentless drive “to establish bridges between borders.” Her understated style makes for gripping reading. Her memoir is about exploring the impossible and doing it!

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.

Lisa Glatt

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.

Dr. Perri Klass

DR. PERRY KLASS is the award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, The Mystery of Breathing, Love and Modern Medicine and A Not Entirely Benign Procedure. She is also a pediatrician who is medical director of the national literary program Reach Out and Read dedicated to promoting literacy as part of pediatric primary care.

Margaret Maron

MARGARET MARON writes the Judge Deborah Knott mystery series, situated in her native North Carolina, as well as the Detective Sigrid Harald of NYPD series, short stories and non-mystery novels. Publishers Weekly calls Maron “one of the most seamless Southern writers since Margaret Mitchell.” Long Beach Public Library lists twenty-two of her titles.

Maile Meloy

MAILE MELOY’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best New American Voices. The New York Times Book Review describes her collection of short stories, Half in Love, as “lean, and controlled in their narration and abundant and moving in their effects.” She captures vibrant moments in life as her characters experience desire, fear and mystery. Her debut novel, Liars and Saints is a multigenerational saga of the Catholic Santerre family.

Lalita Tademy

LALITA TADEMY, in her debut novel, Cane River, recounts with compelling detail the lives of her matriarchal ancestors who were born into slavery in pre-Civil War Louisiana. Tademy describes her historical novel, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, as a work of fiction that is “deeply rooted in years of research, historical fact and family lore.” This universal story of strong-willed survivors is illustrated with documents and evocative photographs.

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.

Suzanne Greenberg

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.

Linda Gregerson

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.

Lyn Hamilton

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.

Hayden Herrera

HAYDEN HERRERA wrote Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, on which the film Frida was based. She has lectured extensively on 20h century art, written essays for numerous art magazines and, as curator of special exhibits, for museum catalogs. Her other books include Frida Kahlo: The Paintings; Matisse: A Portrait; and, more recently, Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work.

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)

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.

Kathryn Harrison

KATHRYN Harrison is the author of the novels Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, as well as a memoir, The Kiss. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers and other publications. Her latest novel, The Seal Wife, is a “delectable moody, erotic, provocative cross-cultural love story.”

Judy Blunt

JUDY BLUNT’s memoir Breaking Clean, which received a Whiting Writers Award, is the antithesis of romanticized myths of the American West. Her beautifully crafted work illuminates the hard life on Montana cattle ranches forty years ago. Born into a third generation ranching family, married at eighteen into another, mother of three, Blunt struggled to escape the stifling confines of a patriarchal culture.

Haven Kimmel

With wry humor, HAVEN KIMMEL vividly portrays the quirky world of adults in a best-selling childhood memoir, A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Moorland Indiana. Kimmel’s affection for her characters and remarkable wit also mark her celebrated debut novel, The Solace of Leaving Early, a love story sparked with theological and philosophical debate.

Elinor Lipman

ELINOR LIPMAN writes romantic comedy for readers who want to be “amused, moved, befriended, included.” She can make us laugh out loud as she converts serious subject matters into humor with the skill of an alchemist. All six of her books are in print, and her seventh, The Pursuit of Alice Thrift,, is due in June.

Sharyn McCrumb

SHARYN McCRUMB’s eighteen novels and two short-story collections celebrate Appalachian history and folklore with such skill that they are studied in universities worldwide. Winner of six Notable Book Awards from The New York Times, she weaves a tale! The Songcatcher follows her own family history, beginning with a young boy kidnapped off the coast of Scotland in 1751.

Joyce Weatherford

A finalist for the Willa Cather Award, JOYCE WEATHERFORD’s debut novel, Heart of the Beast, has been lauded as “not a book, but a spell, an act of magic.” This saga of the American West told from a female perspective comes alive with fiercely rich details grounded in Weatherford’s own experiences growing up on a ranch in eastern Oregon.

Gail Tsukiyama

GAIL TSUKIYAMA was born in San Francisco, California, to a Chinese mother and a Japanese father. Initially a poet, she now uses her cross-cultural experiences in all her novels, the latest of which is Dreaming Waters. She teaches at San Francisco State Universality and is book review editor for the on-line magazine Pacific Rim Voices.

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.

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.

Judith Ryan Hendricks

The central character of Judith Ryan Hendricks’ first novel, Bread Alone, turns emotional trauma into personal triumph by rediscovering her passion for baking. Booklist calls it “charmingly romantic…fun to read…meaningful to remember.” Hendricks, a Long Beach writer, is currently at work on her second novel.

Sandra M. Gilbert

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.

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.

Kathleen Tyau

Reflecting her own background of mixed race and traditions, Kathleen Tyau’s widely acclaimed novels play out against the lush background of Hawaiian cultures and landscapes. The deeply layered, interwoven strands of both Makai and A Little Too Much Is Enough result in works that are, according to The Asian Reprter, “entertaining, innovative, and emotionally satisfying.”

Susan Vreeland

Susan Vreeland has enjoyed a thirty-year career teaching English and ceramics while publishing newspaper pieces and short fiction. Her books about women include What Love Sees, the best seller Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and her recently released The Passion of Artemisia that explores a woman’s struggle to paint in seventeenth-century Italy.

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.

Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of the ALA Notable Story Collection Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry? Her eccentric debut novel, The Giant’s House, a tender story of a friendship between a lonely librarian and an eleven-year-old boy, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. In 1996 Granto magazine named McCracken one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists.

Anchee Min

Anchee Min has of late become the darling of the media, a dramatic change for this former Maoist Red Guard teenager, and later, performer in the role of Madame Mao in Chinese film. From the experience she wrote Becoming Madame Mao, her latest novel, a powerful tale of passion, betrayal, and survival. Other books by Min include the memoir Red Azalea and the novel The Lost Daughters of China.

Susan Minot

Susan Minot is the author of the novels Monkeys, Follys, and her latest, the highly acclaimed, Evening, an exquisite story of memory and desire. Minot’s other works include the short story collection, Lust and Other Stories, and the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s, Stealing Beauty. She has been included in the O. Henry Awards Pushcart Prizes, and the Best American Stories.

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.

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.

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.

Joyce Johnson

Joyce Johnson is the author of the acclaimed memoir Minor Characters that chronicles her experiences with the Beat Generation writers, and the forthcoming Door Wide Open, a collection of letters written between Jack Kerouac and Johnson during their love affair in 1957 and 1958. An accomplished memoir and fiction writer Johnson’s work has appeared in New Yorker, Harpers, New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Diane Leslie

Diane Leslie is the author of Fleur De Leigh’s Life of Crime which, according to the New York Times, “offers a delicious and disturbing glimpse behind the high stucco walls of Hollywood, circa 1957.” She has a genuine gift for creating characters that live and breathe in the posh environs of her childhood. Great wit and insight in both her writing and conversation!

Sandra Tsing Loh

Writer/performer Sandra Tsing Loh has been called a “master of the excruciating moment.” Her witty and trenchant observations of the So Cal scene can be found in her critically acclaimed one-person show, Aliens in America; the best-selling essay collection, Depth Takes a Holiday, and the hilarious novel of L.A., If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now. “The Loh Life,” her lively radio commentary, is heard weekly on KCRW.

Yxta Maya Murray

A graduate of L.B. Millikan High School, and now a professor at Loyola Law School, Yxta Maya Murray is the author of two novels set in today’s East Los Angeles: Locas, and What It Takes To Get To Vegas. According to the Chicago Tribune, Murray is a writer “with an insiders’s eye, eloquently capturing the struggles of being poor and Mexican-American in LA.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Elizabeth Berg

If any author can be said to capture the way women think, it is Elizabeth Berg, author of the best-selling Talk Before Sleep. Her insights into the human condition have led to six intensely moving novels exploring friendship, marriage, mortality, and love in its many varieties. Her most recent book, What We Keep, explores the confused, conflicted landscape of a mother-daughter relationship.

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.

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.

Nora Okja Keller

In her exceptional first novel, Comfort Women, Nora Okja Keller fashions exquisite images to reveal the youthful Beccah’s painful need for a normal home life amidst the tormenting memories of her Korean mother Akiko. Sold at age twelve to service soldiers from the occupying army, Akiko hides her past from the daughter she fiercely loves, retreating into a recurring psychosis and the world of spirits.

Laurie R. King

With Laurie R. King, readers get not one ingenious, articulate woman sleuth, but two: Oxford student Mary Russell, who finds herself leagued with a mostly retired Sherlock Holmes, and police detective Kate Martinelli, who solves homicides in present-day San Francisco. Winner of the Edgar, The Nero Wolfe, and Britain’s John Creasey Dagger awards, King challenges and delights in these two intricate, well crafted series.

Cristina Garcia

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.

Pam Houston

Pam Houston, in her newest book Waltzing the Cat, explores the life of Lucy, an award-winning landscape photographer. Author of the widely acclaimed short story collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Houston once again inspires and challenges her readers with an engaging, unconventional heroine, who takes physical and emotional risks.

Beverly Coyle

Beverly Coyle’s fiction bares hypocrisy and explores character with insight and humor. The Kneeling Bus and In Troubled Waters re-create small town Florida, examine how we face coming of age, racism, political correctness and Alzheimer’s disease. Taken In, her new work, is due in May.

Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat’s two works…Breath, Eyes, Memory, a novel, and Krak? Krak!, a collection of Haitian stories….explore the lives of women who must prove themselves “brave as stars out at dawn.” Revelations unfold in elegant prose with the truth and lyricism of memorable poetry.

Carroll Lachnit

Carroll Lachnit informs the mystery with her print journalism experience. Murder in Brief introduces cop-turned-lawyer Hannah Barlow. In A Blessed Death, she probes related mysteries of faith, family, and a woman’s demise. Hannah studies independent adoption in Blood Ties soon.

Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes, widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer, takes the reader into the heart of Italy through her sensuous memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun. Her poetic descriptions bring alive the adventures of purchasing, restoring, and living in an abandoned villa in this spectacular countryside.

Jan Wong

Jan Wong, Canadian of Chinese descent, entered China in 1972 as a starry-eyed Maoist to join the Cultural Revolution. Red China Blues entertains and enlightens us with Wong’s two journeys: as a Beijing University student expressing solidarity with the masses; later as a journalist viewing socio-political change.

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.

Lois-Ann Yamanaka

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers and Blu’s Hanging, feature girl heroines speaking in pidgin, the dialect of impoverished 18th-century Hawaiian plantation workers that filtered down through multi-ethnic generations. Poetic and salty, her work reveals a darker side of the Hawaiian paradise.

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.

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Jacquelyn Mitchard, magazine and newspaper journalist, has written a moving first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean. Braided into her suspenseful plot about a missing child are psychological truths about motherhood, family relationships, and the sustaining importance of friendship. This book was chosen as the first to be featured in Oprah Winfrey’s national reading group.

Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux pulls us “into the frightening brilliance of the world” in her two poetry collections, Awake and What We Carry. Her poetry transcends the ordinary facts of experience with elegance. It flies to the center of the nitty-gritty to emerge triumphant and sings about where we live.

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.

Jonis Agee

Jonis Agee, acclaimed for her short stories, poetry, and two novels: Sweet Eyes which holds small-town morality under a microscope; and Strange Angels that explores the power of familial and cultural myths of the contemporary West. South of Resurrection is due in 1997.

Jill Ciment

Jill Ciment, author of Small Claims and The Law of Falling Bodies, chronicles her adolescent years in her memoir, Half a Life. “I felt for girls my age; we were more likely to have gone out in the world like Huckleberry Finn. I thought it was a story no one ever told.” Ciment reveals all, sometimes to the reader’s discomfort.

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.

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.

M.G. Lord

M.G. Lord’s Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, is no ordinary biography. She uses her talents as an editorial cartoonist and investigative journalist to explore the social influence of Barbie. It will change forever how readers look at the doll and themselves.

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,

Belle Yang

Belle Yang’s first book, Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders, is an enchanting and beautiful work. Her vibrant illustrations brighten the stories inspired by her father’s boyhood memories of growing up in Manchuria. At first the characters of these stories became the subjects of her art, but Yang felt she needed to do more than paint to express their voices. So the painter became a storyteller and the paintings and the stories flow together to create this extraordinary book.

Kirsten Lagatree

Kirsten Lagatree explains that her book, Feng Shui: Arranging Your Home to Change Your Life, holds ancient Asian wisdom “for the rest of us.” This simple and highly readable work describes the what, why and how of feng shui, also known as the Chinese art of placement. It gives a room-by-room guide to transforming your home and office in ways that can bring about positive changes in your life.

Giaconda Belli

Giaconda Belli’s novel, The Inhabited Woman, a political adventure romance, draws from her background as part of the Managuan upper crust and subsequent life as a Sandanista revolutionary. She and another became the last survivors of her cell. Her poetry, which celebrates equality, both political and sexual, has won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize. Harlold Pinter describes her as “one of the most gifted writers to come out of Central America in the last ten years.”

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.

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,

Ann Haymond Zwinger

Ann Haymond Zwinger published the two latest of her sixteen books, Downcanyon (Western Arts Federation Award) and Wilderness Women (co-edited with her daughter Susan) in 1995. Genesis: the Yosemite Valley will come out later this year. This naturalist, with a B.A. from Wellesley and M.A. in Art History from Indiana University, taught at Smith before marrying and raising three daughters. During her thirties she returned to writing and illustrating nature books.

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.”

Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses, A Natural History of Love, and other volumes of nonfiction and poetry, is a rare combination of poet and scientist. Recipient of a number of awards, grants and honors, she has taught at a number of universities. Ackerman’s work appears regularly in The New Yorker, National Geographic and The New York Times.

Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan’s The Book of Medicines, a work of poetry, “feels like a gift from the earth’s past to the present moment,” wrote Barbara Kingsolver, who described the Chicasaw poet’s first novel, Mean Spirit, a finalist for 1991 Pulitzer Prize, as “North American magic realism …a vast tragedy… carved to fit the human heart.” Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of a NEA grant, among numerous awards, Linda Hogan teaches at the University of Colorado.

Jan Burke

Novelist Jan Burke took the mystery-loving world by storm with Goodnight Irene. The unsolicited manuscript won her a three-book contract with Simon and Schuster. Sweet Dream’s, Irene and Dear Irene are the second and third novels in Burke’s Irene series. It will be hard to beat the excitement of her first novel. President Bill Clinton held Goodnight Irene up on national TV when asked what he’d been reading lately.

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.

Elizabeth Kendall

Elizabeth Kendall, praised as “one of our most astute film and dance historians,” shares her social insights of the arts. Kendall is a teacher, journalist, scriptwriter, consultant, lecturer and author of the wonderfully entertaining Where She Danced, about the origins of modern dance in America, and The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930’s, an intriguing analysis that vividly evokes the way Hollywood reflected and shaped the character of the American woman.

Jo-Ann Mapson

Jo-Ann Mapson is a novelist, poet, and a college teacher. Her second novel Blue Rodeo, a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection, was deemed by Publisher’s Weekly “an engrossing, affection story,” and “wise in the ways of the human heart.” Mapson’s other works include Fault Line, a collection of short fiction; a novel Hank & Chloe; and Spooking the Horses, a book of poetry. She is working on Shadow Ranch, her third novel, due for publication in the fall of 1995.

Ursula Hegi

Ursula Hegi lived the first eighteen years of her life in Germany. She is the award-winning author of three novels, Intrusions, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, and Stones from the River, a major novel of Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. Her next novel, Salt Dancers, is scheduled for publication in 1995.

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip

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.

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One, 1884-1933, has been hailed as a book that “should completely change historical interpretations of the life and times of Eleanor Roosevelt.” Cook’s biography of one of America’s most fascinating and influential political women is scholarly and absorbing. A historian and journalist, Cook is professor of History and Women’s Studies at City University of New York. She is currently as work on Volume Two.

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.

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.

Laurel Ann Bogen

Laurel Ann Bogen, acclaimed poet/performer in Los Angeles, was nominated in 1991 for a Pulitzer Prize after publication of her book, The Burning. She was selected as Los Angeles’s “Best Female Poet/Performer” in 1989. Emotional and humorous, her work often reflects personal upheaval and passion gone astray. The voice is “sometimes fragile, as it confronts intense private fractures, and it is also humorous as it triumphs and heals.”

Lane Von Herzen

Lane Von Herzen’s lyrical first novel Copper Crown portrays an interracial friendship that transcends the bigotry and violence of rural Texas in the early 1900’s. Published in 1991, it was a Literary Guild selection and a featured novel in B. Dalton’s Discover Great New Writers series. Von Herzen won the 1990 Los Angeles Arts Council Fiction Prize. That same year she received her M.F.A. degree from the University of California at Irvine.

Carol Muske-Dukes

Carol Muske Dukes is the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry, including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a National Education Association award, and an Ingram Merrill Fellowship. Dear Digby, her hilarious yet poignant first novel, is scheduled to be made into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer, and she recently published a second novel called Saving St. Germ. Muske-Dukes teaches at the University of Southern California.

Jane Langton

Jane Langton likes “to use something superb by somebody else as a sort of background” in her books: the writing of Emerson (The Transcendental Murder); Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson Is Dead); the Divine Comedy (The Dante Game); Handel’s Messiah (The Memorial Hall Murder); art masterpieces (Murder at the Gardner); and Thoreau territory (God in Concord) for her most recent mystery.

Elizabeth Barber

Elizabeth Barber started a two month project for a 10-page article about women and weaving in prehistoric ages which became a 17-year project culminating in her work, Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. She has just completed her third book, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, for which she is doing the illustrations. We are most grateful to Elizabeth Barber for filling in for us when Alice Kohler had to forgo her participation at the Festival.

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.

Mitsuye Yamada

Born in Japan, raised in Seattle, survivor of an Idaho internment camp, Mitsuye Yamada reflects a unique cultural heritage in her collections of poetry and prose. Camp Notes and Other Poems and Desert Run: Poems and Stories draw on her experiences as an Asian-American woman and an advocate for human rights. Said one reviewer, “Yamada’s poetry and prose resonate with wit, power and poignancy.”

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.

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.

Susan Straight

Susan Straight writes from the unique perspective of a white woman immersed in the black community in which she lives. Her gifts are acute perception and a breathtaking ability to express what her heart discovers. The epiphanies of Aquaboogie: A Novel in Stories illuminate the delicate balance Straight’s characters maintain as they evolve within their culture and the wider world. Her second novel is Living Large.

Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita’s first novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, received the American Book Award for fiction in 1991. She has also conceived and written performance-art pieces for the Japanese-American Museum and the Taper, Too. Currently she is at work on Burajiru, a novel about Japanese immigration to Brazil scheduled to be published next fall.

Diane Wood Middlebrook

Diane Wood Middlebrook, poet, literary critic and professor of English at Stanford University, chronicles with sensitivity and compassion the metamorphosis of a poorly educated “mad housewife” into a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet in her resently released book, Anne Sexton: A Biography. Among Middlebrook’s other publications are Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, edited with Diana George, and a collection of her own poetry, Gin Considered as a Demon.

Marcia Muller

Marcia Muller, a former English literature and journalism major, created the role model for all contemporary women p.i.’s in Sharon McCone, heroine of eleven mysteries. Besides its stay-up-till-its-over plot, her latest, Where Echoes Live, is enriched by the idea that courage to change one’s life does not belong solely to youth and by its setting in fictionalized Mono Lake and Bodie, California.

Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee is both scholar (currently at Berkley) and writer. Her novels include The Tiger Daughter’s Wife, and Jasmine. She has written several short story collections, Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, in addition to two nonfiction works, Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy. Through her characters we learn not only about Indian women, and what immigrant women face, but about ourselves.

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.

Jenny Joseph

Jenny Joseph lives in the Cotswalds in England. She is best known, locally, for her poem Warning, which begins, “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple….” She has authored several books of poetry, most recently The Inland Sea, (published by Papier-Mache Press in Watsonville, California), and six children’s books, as well as Persephone, her fiction in prose and verse, which won the James Tait Black award for fiction in 1986.

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.

Marlane Meyer

From the luckless underclass come the characters for Marlane Meyer’s plays, Etta Jenks, Kingfish, and The Geography of Luck, which were produced by the Los Angeles Theatre Center when Meyer was the playwright in residence in 1988-1989. No stranger to adversity herself, she writes of those on the fringe whose struggles for survival bring them through sorrow and bitterness to some surprising conclusions.

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.

Joanne Meschery

“Nothing short of extraordinary,” was Raymond Carver’s assessment of Joanne Meschery’s first novel, In a High Place. Her second novel, A Gentleman’s Guide to the Frontier, blends fact and legend for a re-telling that unsettles the settling of the Old West. With this fresh and memorable work, Meschery takes her place as a writer of classically American Fiction.

Jill McCorkle

Jill McCorkle, critically acclaimed young novelist from North Carolina, creates with sharp wit and keen eye for detail the lively characters in her four novels of the contemporary South, The Cheer Leader, July 7, Tending To Virginia, and Ferris Beach. McCorkle is a natural Southern storyteller with a wise understanding of the human heart.

Barbara Kingsolver

Add Barbara Kingsolver’s distinctive voice to those who write vividly and authentically about women. Publisher’s Weekly hailed her first novel, The Bean Trees, as “an overwhelming delight, as random and unexpected as real life.” The New York Times Book Review found in the characters of Homeland, her collection of twelve short stories, “a moral toughness…that one sees in real people everywhere but rarely in recent American short stories.” Most recently, in her nonfiction book Holding the Line, she has turned her attention to the roles played by women in the copper mine strike of 1983.

Bebe Moore Campbell

Bebe Moore Campbell brings us a sensitive, lyrical account of growing up “with and without my father” in her autobiographical Sweet Summer, a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Literature Award and the Midwestern Radio Theatre Workshop Competition. She is also the author of Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage.

Mae Briskin

Mae Briskin, who did not start writing until age 45, has achieved wide recognition for her collection of short stories, A Boy Like Astrid’s Mother. The book received the 1989 PEN American Center West Award for Fiction (Short Story Category), Los Angeles Times “Critics Choice” and other honors. Her exquisitely wrought stories restore the reader’s faith in humanity and give insight into the feelings and connections between people. She has a new book which will be available in the Fall of 1990

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.

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.

Kaye Gibbons

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.

Sue Grafton

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.

Susan Allen Toth

Susan Allen Toth was born in Ames, Iowa in 1940. She writes of her years there with wit and an eye for remembered detail in Blooming: A Small Town Girlhood, which in 1981 received the New York Times Book Review Notable Book Award. It’s sequel, Ivy Days: Making My Way Out East, brings us universally recognized moments and characters from the tumultuous college years. Her most recent book is How to Prepare for Your High School Reunion and Other Midlife Musings.

Terry McMillan

Mama!….hilarious, horrifying and moving, in turn, is the first novel of Terry McMillan. She zeroes in on the poverty, economic, cultural and spiritual, which stamp the lives of her unforgettable characters. McMillan was featured in Esquire Magazine, July 1988 Literature Issue, alongside Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Joseph Heller. Her new novel, Men With Good Hands, was excerpted in that same issue.

Elizabeth George

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.

Maria Gillan

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.”

Jill Marie Landis

Jill Marie Landis was a member of our Literary Women planning committee until she got so busy writing her first novel that we had to give her some time off. We are delighted that her talent and hard work won her the Golden Heart Award for her first historical romance, Sunflower, published by Berkley Books in 1988. Named “best new historical writer in 1987-88” by Romantic Times, Jill will have two books out in 1989 and yet more in 1990!

Shelley List

Shelley List is the many-talented, multi-award-winning, socially-conscious television Head Writer/Producer of television series: Cagney and Lacey, And Baby Makes Six, Something So Right, and Between Friends. She is the author of three novels: Did You Love Daddy When I was Born, Nobody Makes Me Cry, and Forgiving. She has been a feature editor, theater reviewer and author of journalistic articles for leading magazines, as well as the New York and Los Angeles Times.

Elizabeth Benedict

Elizabeth Benedict knows women. In Slow Dancing she answers all the questions about how it was to be a liberated, college-educated career woman in the seventies. In Beginner’s Book of Dreams, she sensitively gives us a girl growing to womanhood in the fifties and sixties, and her mother with her forties and fifties history. This is a young novelist of strong power.

Marcia Cohen

Marcia Cohen chronicles the women’s movement in her irreverent The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World. Focusing on Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer and Kate Millet, this revealing group portrait traces the women whose ideas and actions have profoundly transformed all of our lives. Cohen has written articles for The New York Times and Ladies Home Journal, and has been a reporter and editor for The New York Daily News.

Diane Johnson

Diane Johnson blends accurate observation of contemporary life with satiric comments and unexpected humor in her powerful novels. Her current Persian Nights, set in Iran when the Shah’s power was crumbling, features an American wife and mother struggling to understand Iranian society and to fulfill herself as well. Other novels are Loving Hands at Home, Burning, and The Shadow Knows. Her biographies are: Lesser Lives and Dashiell Hammett: book reviews are collected in Terrorists and Novelists.

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.

Dorothy Bryant

Dorothy Bryant, publisher of Ata Books in Berkeley, speaks with honesty to the humanity of those without money, privilege or position in a variety of pertinent and timely novels. The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You is now a “cult classic,” A Day in San Francisco is relevant to the AIDS pandemic; and Ella Price’s Journal is a must reading for women. She achieves a splendid maturing in The Confessions of Madame Psyche.

Wendy Hornsby

Wendy Hornsby’s novel, No Harm, just published by Dodd, Mead & Co., Inc., was called a “tightly controlled first mystery” in August by Publisher’s Weekly. It deals with the chicanery and death over a piece of California waterfront property. Publishing has brought confidence to this writer and she has a second mystery ready. She lives in Long Beach with her husband and children.

Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott is a two-published-novels young writer, whose latest, That Night, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times 1987 Fiction Prize. Her vision of a pair of1960’s teenage lovers seems to say we can only defeat death with love. Only 28 when her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter, was published, Alice credits the writing program at the University of New Hampshire as important to her development.

Cyra McFadden

Cyra McFadden wrote her rolicking best-selling biography, Rain or Shine, about her father and mother; he, the Cy Taillon of rodeo announcing (who made up her name from his) and she, the Patricia Montgomery of vaudeville and the St. Louis Municipal Opera. Her previous book, The Serial, a social satire of life in Marin County, was published in 1977. She also writes a bi-weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner.

Mary Higgins Clark

Mary Higgins Clark has kept her readers avidly turning the pages through six best-selling suspense novels: Where Are the Children? (the film starred Jill Clayburgh), A Stranger Is Watching, The Cradle Will Fall, A Cry in the Night, Stillwatch, and last year, Weep No More, My Lady. A grandmother, she seems to know what most frightens women, taps into this anxiety and entertains them by letting them live their fears safely, through an escape into her books.

Nancy Mairs

Nancy Mairs, author of Plaintext, a collection of essays, was born in Long Beach. She now lives in Tucson with her husband and children. A graduate of Wheaton College, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. She writes of triumph and despair, not only as a victim of crippling illness, but as a vibrant human being.

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.

Myra Cohn Livingston

Myra Cohn Livingston, award-winning poet, anthologist, teacher and educator, is the author of over 45 books, including Worlds I Know and Other Poems, Celebrations, A Lollygag of Limericks and her most recent, Earth Songs, and Higgledy-Piggledy: Verses and Pictures.

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler, a resident of Los Angeles, invents new societies to project ideas of women’s and racial situations into the future. Her intriguing grasp has brought the prestigious Nebula award and two Hugo awards. Books include Bloodchild, Patternmaster, Survivor and Clay’s Ark. Soon to appear: Xenogenesis Trilogy.

Susan Kenney

Susan Kenney’s novel, In Another Country, won the 1984 New Voice Literary Award and has been published in four languages. The Colby College, Maine, teacher of English has been published extensively for over a decade in a variety of genres. Her novels include Garden of Malice and Graves of Academe. Kenney’s slide presentation will relate the fact and fiction of place.

Judith Thurman

Judith Thurman’s Isak Dinesen:The Life of a Storyteller is the result of penetrating research into the private world of the author of Out of Africa. This widely travelled New Yorker is a translator and a contributor to Vogue, Ms., Cosmopolitan and the Village Voice, as well as poet, anthologist and and associate producer of Out of Africa starring Meryl Streep.

Susan Hubbel

Susan Hubbel’s A Country Year reflects her discoveries on a peninsula between the Ozark Mountains. Before becoming a commercial beekeeper, Hubbel managed a bookstore and was a librarian. A burgeoning cult has developed around her book, only published in 1986.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Maryse Conde

Maryse Conde, novelist, playwright, producer, essayist, lecturer, and Professor of West Indies and African literature at the Sorbonne, this year is Fulbright Scholar in Residence at Occidental College.

Josephine Humphreys

Josephine Humphreys lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Her lyrical and introspective novel Dreams of Sleep has received PEN’s 1985 Ernest Hemingway prize for a first novel.

Dottie Lamm

Dottie Lamm wrote her delightful book Second Banana as a result of her experiences as the wife of Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado. She is also a television talk show host and a popular columnist for the Denver Post.

Diane Thomas

Diane Thomas….The success of Romancing the Stone turned this 33-year-old Long Beach screenwriter into Hollywood’s Cinderella of 1984. “Hollywood loves an overnight success, ” says Ms. Thomas, “but, as everyone knows, it’s never overnight.”

Pamela Alexander

Pamela Alexander’s first collection of poems, Navigable Waterways, will be published this Spring, and is distinguished as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize of 1984.

Helena Maria Viramontes

Helena Maria Viramontes, another prizewinner, brings a unique insight into Chicano Literature. Born in East Los Angeles, a lecturer and short story writer, her first book, The Moths and Other Stories, will be out this Spring.

Marilyn Yalom

Marilyn Yalom of Stanford’s Center for Research on Women, edited Women Writers of the West Coast, public dialogues and candid discussion of ten writers sharing “rare fragments of their life stories as well as insights into their writing techniques.” Dr. Yalom is also the author of Maternity, Morality and the Literature of Madness.

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.

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.

Bernice Kert

Bernice Kert’s fascinating book, The Hemingway Women, is about Ernest Hemingway’s relationships with his mother, his four wives, and other women important to his life. Ten years in the researching and writing, this is Mrs. Kert’s first published book, and the welcome given it by critics and public alike has enabled her to know the joys of “sweet success at sixty.”

Alice Adams

The Long And The Short Of It

Alice Adams, novelist and short story writer, is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and her stories have been included in many O’Henry collections. Novels: Rich Rewards, Listening to Billy, Families and Survivors. Short story collections: Beautiful Girl, To See You Again.

Kate (Shirley) Coscarelli

How to Find Fame and Fortune - A Novel Approach

Long Beach’s own Kate (Shirley) Coscarelli will share the experiences of writing and publishing a first novel.

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.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

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.”

Karen Kenyon

Breaking The Silence: Writing Your Autobiography

Karen Kenyon, author of Sunshower, teams up with Louise De Grave to discuss the writing of their own stories, encouraging others to do the same.

Barbara Kroll

‘Twas A Dark And Stormy Night…

Barbara Kroll, humorist, teacher, essay contest enterer, researcher, and first-runner up in the Bulwer-Lytton contest for writing the “worst” opening sentence.

Inez Maury

My Mother and I Are Growing Strong…

And My Mother the Mail Carrier are the books written by Inez Maury for children…fresh, imaginative, and “rooted in today’s social reality.” She will be joined by Edythe Mc Govern.

Edythe Mc Govern

They’re Never Too Young for Books…

Edythe Mc Govern, Chairman Valley College English Department, and author of They’re Never Too Young for Books, joins Inez Maury to discuss writing books for children and the need for them to be “read to.”

Gloria Naylor

1983 American Book Award Winner

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

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.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Genre-Straddling For Fun And Profit

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro writes science fiction, mystery, historical as well as juvenile fiction, and is the author of The Saint Germain Chronicles and The God Forsaken, and many others.

Jacqueline Briskin

What’s Novel in California?

Morning Session
Jacqueline Briskin, author of Onyx, Paloverde and others.

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.

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.

Betty Harper Fussell

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.

Helene Hanff

BETTER THAN RUBIES
…our author talks about her fans.

Luncheon Speaker
Helene Hanff on her maiden voyage to California. Author of 84 Charing Cross Road…. a love affair with reading. (Now a play, opening in New York in December, and starring Ellen Burstyn.) Also, Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, numerous TV scripts and the highly personal tourist guide of New York, Apple of My Eye.

Robin Johnson

Trampling Out the Vintage

Morning Session
Robin Johnson, PhD, poet-in-residence at Pepperdine University joins Ann Stanford, Ph.D., poet, and editor of The Women Poets in English for this discussion.

Elaine Kendall

As a matter of fact

Afternoon Session
Elaine Kendall, author of The Upper Hand, The Happy Mediocrity, and Peculiar Institutions… and Los Angeles Times critic. She is joined by Betty Harper Fussell for this presentation.

Cynthia Whitcomb Mandelberg

“Grand Slam”: Writing for Television, Film and Stage

Opening Speaker
Cynthia Whitcomb Mandelberg is a Long Beach writer of outstanding television biographies, including Eleanor, First Lady of the World starring Jean Stapleton in May of 1982, and The Grace Kelly Story being produced in association with Cheryl Ladd. Also, Looking Glass a play based on the life of Lewis Carroll.

Patricia Matthews

I’ll take romance!

Afternoon Session
Patricia Matthews, author of Love’s Raging Tide, Midnight Whispers and Tides of Love.

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.

Carolyn See

What’s Novel in California?

Morning Session
Carolyn See, Los Angeles Times critic, author of Mothers, Daughters and Rhine Maidens.

Roberta Smoodin

Meditations on the Meaning of Magic

Morning Session
Roberta Smoodin, author of Presto!

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.