Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry | Moderators |
Listed in alphabetical order
David Arnold
The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven: A Novel – Sunday, 1:30 PM
David Arnold is the New York Times bestselling author of The Electric Kingdom, Mosquitoland, Kids of Appetite, and The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik. He has won the Southern Book Prize and the Great Lakes Book Award, and was named a Publishers Weekly Flying Start for his debut. His books have been translated into over a dozen languages. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife and son. Learn more at davidarnoldbooks.com and follow him on Instagram @iamdavidarnold.
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Mona Awad
Campus Culture: The Academic Novel Comes of Age – Saturday, 4:30 PM
Mona Awad is the author of Bunny, named a Best Book of 2019 by TIME, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It was a finalist for the New England Book Award and a Goodreads Choice Award. It is currently in development for film with Jenni Konner and New Regency Productions. Awad’s first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, TIME, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction in the MFA program at Syracuse University. Photo Credit: Bridgette Lacombe.
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Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka
Romance by the Book – Sunday, 2:30 PM
Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka met and fell in love in high school. Austin went on to graduate from Harvard, while Emily graduated from Princeton. Together, they are the authors of The Roughest Draft, as well as several novels about romance for teens. Now married, they live in Los Angeles, where they continue to take daily inspiration from their own love story.
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Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang is the award-winning author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and two novels, Inheritance and All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost. The director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in Iowa City. Photo Credit: Ife Oluwa Nihinlola
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Elaine Hsieh Chou
Campus Culture: The Academic Novel Comes of Age – Saturday, 4:30 PM
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. A 2017 Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow at NYU and a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow, her short fiction appears in Black Warrior Review, Guernica, Tin House Online, and Ploughshares. Disorientation is her first novel. Photo Credit: Cindy Trinh.
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C.J. Farley
From Debut to HBO: Kim Johnson on Her First Book, This Is My America — Friday, 6:00 PM
The Lengths That We Will Go To: In Conversation with C.J. Farley and Desmond Hall – Saturday, 10:00 AM
C.J. Farley is the author of five novels, including the new young adult novel “Zero O’Clock,” and a number of non-fiction books including “Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley” and the national bestseller “Aaliyah: More than a Woman,” which was adapted into a hit movie for Lifetime television. Farley co-wrote and co-edited the book “The Blues” (Harper Collins), the companion volume to Martin Scorsese’s PBS documentary series. Farley’s short fiction has been featured in a number of anthologies including “The Vintage Book of War Fiction” and “King-ston Noir.” A graduate of Harvard, he has won a number of awards including an NAACP Image Award in 2020. Farley’s latest novel “Zero O’Clock” is about a teenager in New Rochelle grappling with the pandemic who finds herself in the Black Lives Matter movement. “The Hate U Give,” author Angie Thomas said “Zero O’Clock” is “insightful, eye-opening, and inventive.”
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Erica Ferencik
Books that Thrill – Sunday, 11:00 AM
Erica Ferencik is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Boston University. Her work has appeared in Salon and The Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio. To research The River at Night, Into the Jungle, and her upcoming thriller GIRL IN ICE, which Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will publish in March 2022, she ventured deep into the remote forests of the Allagash Territory in northern Maine, rafted the Amazon River in the jungles of Peru, and explored the desolate iceberg-packed fjords of Greenland.
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Jen Ferguson
Jen Ferguson (she/her) is Métis and white, an activist, a feminist, an auntie, and an accomplice armed with a PhD. She believes writing, teaching and beading are political acts. Her debut YA novel, THE SUMMER OF BITTER AND SWEET, is forthcoming from Heartdrum / HarperCollins in Summer 2022. Photo Credit: Mel Shea
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Heather Gudenkauf
Books that Thrill – Sunday, 11:00 AM
Heather Gudenkauf is the Edgar Award nominated, New York Times & USA Today bestselling author of nine novels. Her debut novel, The Weight of Silence was an instant NYT bestseller and remained on the list for 22 weeks. The Overnight Guest, published in January, is a USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and NYT bestseller. The NYT de-scribed The Overnight Guest as, “Fully realized, wholly absorbing and almost painfully suspenseful… The journey is mesmerizing.” Gudenkauf’s critically acclaimed novels have been published in over 20 countries. She lives in Iowa with her family.
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Desmond Hall
The Lengths That We Will Go To: In Conversation with C.J. Farley and Desmond Hall – Saturday, 10:00 AM
Desmond Hall was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and moved to Jamaica, Queens. He has worked as a high school biology and English teacher in East New York, Brooklyn; counseled teenage ex-cons after their release from Rikers Island; and served as Spike Lee’s creative director at Spike DDB. Desmond has served on the board of the Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the Advertising Council and judged the One Show, the American Advertising Awards, and the NYC Downtown Short Film Festival. He’s also been named one of Variety magazine’s Top 50 Creatives to Watch. Desmond lives outside of Boston with his wife and two daughters.
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Meredith Hall
I’m Sorry for Your Loss: Writing About Grief – Sunday, 2:30 PM
Meredith Hall’s memoir Without a Map became a New York Times bestseller. It was named Best Book of the Year by Kirkus and BookSense, as well as Elle’s “Readers’ Pick of the Year.” Ms. Hall was a recipient of the 2004 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Paris Review, Five Points, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review and many other journals. Hall divides her time between Maine and California.
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Edwin Hill
Books that Thrill – Sunday, 11:00 AM
Edwin Hill’s critically-acclaimed crime novels include the standalone thriller, The Secrets We Share, and three novels featuring Hester Thursby: Little Comfort, The Missing Ones, and Watch Her. He has been nominated for Edgar and Agatha Awards, featured in Us Magazine, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal, and was recognized as one of “Six Crime Writers to Watch” in Mystery Scene magazine. He lives in Roslindale, Massachusetts with his partner Michael and his favorite reviewer, their lab Edith Ann, who likes his first drafts enough to eat them.
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Lisa Jewell
Lisa Jewell is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of nineteen novels, including The Family Upstairs and Then She Was Gone, as well as Invisible Girl and Watching You. Her novels have sold over 5 million copies internationally, and her work has also been translated into twenty-nine languages. Connect with her on Twitter @LisaJewellUK, on Instagram @LisaJewellUK, and on Facebook @LisaJewellOfficial. Photo Credit: Andrew Whitton.
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Kim Johnson
From Debut to HBO: Kim Johnson on Her First Book, This Is My America — Friday, 6:00 PM
Kim Johnson held leadership positions in social justice organizations as a teen. She’s now a college administrator who maintains civic engagement throughout the community while also mentoring Black student activists and leaders. This Is My America is her debut novel. It explores racial injustice against innocent Black men who are criminally sentenced and the families left behind to pick up the pieces. She holds degrees from the University of Oregon and the University of Maryland, College Park. Kim lives her best life in Oregon with her husband and two kids. Find her at KCJOHNSONWRITES.COM and follow her on Twitter and Instagram @kcjohnsonwrites.
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Julia May Jonas
Campus Culture: The Academic Novel Comes of Age – Saturday, 4:30 PM
Julia May Jonas is a playwright and teaches theater at Skidmore College. She holds an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family. Vladimir is her debut novel.
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Lauren Kate
Romance by the Book – Sunday, 2:30 PM
Lauren Kate is the #1 New York Times and internationally bestselling author of nine novels for young adults, including Fallen, which was made into a major motion picture. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. She is also the author of The Orphan’s Song, her debut adult novel. By Any Other Name is her second adult novel. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
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Lily King
Keeping it Short: Lily King and the Short Story – Sunday, 3:45 PM
Lily King is the award-winning author of five novels. Her most recent novel, Writers & Lovers, was published on March 3rd, 2020, and her first collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter, will be released on November 9, 2021. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, The New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME‘s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014.
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Jean Hanff Korelitz
An Early Look at The Latecomer: Jean Hanff Korelitz – Saturday, 12:15 PM
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Grace D. Li
The Art of the Art-Full Mystery – Sunday, 3:45 PM
Grace D. Li grew up in Pearland, Texas and is a graduate of Duke University, where she studied biology and creative writing. She lives in Northern California and attends medical school at Stanford University. Portrait of a Thief is her debut novel and is currently in development at Netflix, with Grace serving as an executive producer for the series. Photo Credit: Yi Li.
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Kit Mayquist
Fear and Haunting in the 21st Century: The Gothic Novel Gets an Update – Saturday, 2:15 PM
A fan of everything spooky and indulgent, Kit Mayquist is a bisexual, trans masculine writer who can be found in the historic shadows of Boston, MA, hunched over his desk with a sullen Persian cat in his lap and surrounded in antiques. He has a MA degree in Medieval History from the University of Iceland, and a BA from Portland State University (and if you ask him, yes, Stumptown will always have the best coffee).
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Charlotte McConaghy
It’s Getting Hot in Here: Climate Change in Fiction – Saturday, 7:00 PM
Charlotte McConaghy is the author of the novels Migrations, a national bestseller that is being translated into over twenty languages, and the New York Times bestseller Once There Were Wolves. She is based in Sydney, Australia.
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Mike Meginnis
Literary Matchmaking: The Author/Agent Relationship – Sunday, 12:15 PM
Mike Meginnis is the author of Drowning Practice (2022, Ecco) and Fat Man and Little Boy (2014, Black Balloon). His short fiction and essays have appeared in Hobart, PANK, The Lifted Brow, Recommended Reading, Booth, The Pinch, The Collagist, Fanzine, American Book Review, and many others. His story “Navigators” appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012. He cohosts the podcast Gift Horse with his partner, Tracy Rae Bowling. Mike lives and works in Iowa City.
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Nathaniel Ian Miller
The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven: A Novel – Sunday, 1:30 PM
Nathaniel Ian Miller, who holds an MFA in Creative Writing and MS in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, is a former resident in the Arctic Circle Expeditionary Program. He has written for Virginia Quarterly Review, and for newspapers in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Montana, and Colorado, for which he received multiple Associated Press Awards. He lives with his family on a farm in central Vermont. Photo Credit: Eilis O’Herlihy.
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Aliya King Neil
Aliya King Neil is an award-winning journalist and the author and coauthor of books for teens and adults. Her work has appeared in Vibe, Giant, Uptown, Essence, King, Ms., Us Weekly, and Teen People, among others. Keep Your Head Up is her first picture book. Visit her at AliyaSKing.com.
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Charly Palmer
Charly Palmer was born in 1960 in Fayette, Alabama and raised in Milwaukee. He relocated to Chicago to study Art and Design at American Academy of Art and School of the Art Institute. His path as an artist was inspired by his fascination in his youth by illustrations in Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day. “I could never get enough of the imagery in the book,” he says Keats’ work was magical and planted a seed in his young heart. What appealed to him most is the random geometric shapes, the simplicity of layered textures and patterns, and the mix of bold colors.
Today Palmer is widely recognized not just as a fine artist but also as a muralist, illustrator of children’s books, teacher, graphic designer and mentor. Highly sought after for public commissions; notable ones include the posters for the 1996 Olympics and the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau and being selected as the official artist for the 2013 Atlanta Jazz Festival. In 2016, he was selected by Fisk University to execute original artwork commemorating their 150th anniversary; in 2017 Howard University commissioned him for their 150th anniversary celebration. A major project for the Green Bay Packers featuring 20 portraits of players hangs in Lambeau Stadium.
Recently he was selected by John Legend to create a portrait for the cover of his album “Bigger Love,” released in June 2020 and by Time Magazine to create the cover art for their July 6/ July 13, 2020 issue. Additional paintings by Palmer are included throughout the magazine. Most recently he was featured in Rolling Stone Magazine and on the October 2020 cover of Christianity Today Magazine.
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Sameer Pandya
Members Only: A Conversation With Sameer Pandya – Sunday, 11:00 AM
Sameer Pandya is the author of the novel Members Only, a finalist for the California Book Award and an NPR Best Books of 2020. His story collection The Blind Writer was longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN. The recipient of the PEN/Civitella Fellowship, he is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Jo Piazza
Jo is the national and international bestselling author of many critically acclaimed novels and nonfiction books including Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win, The Knockoff and How to Be Married. Her work has been published in ten languages in twelve countries and four of her books have been optioned for film and television. A former editor, columnist and travel writer with Yahoo, Current TV and the New York Daily News, her work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York magazine, Glamour, Elle, Time, Marie Claire, the Daily Beast, and Slate. She holds an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s in journalism from Columbia University, and a master’s in religious studies from New York University. She lives in Philly with her husband, Nick Aster, and two young children.
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Christine Pride
Christine Pride is a writer, editor and long time publishing veteran. She’s held editorial posts at many different imprints including Doubleday, Broadway, Crown, Hyperion, and Simon and Schuster. As an editor, Christine published many bestselling and critically acclaimed books, with a special emphasis on inspirational stories and memoir. As a freelance editorial consultant, she does select editorial work and proposal/content development, as well as teaching and coaching and pens a regular column— “Race Matters” — for Cup of Jo. You can reach her at Christine@christinepride.com or @cpride on Instagram.
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Bill Roorbach
Stay Gone Days: A Conversation with Author Steve Yarbrough – Saturday, 3:30 PM
With Any Luck: An American Love Story – Sunday, 10:00 AM
Bill Roorbach newest novel, Lucky Turtle, will be published April 26, 2022, by Algonquin. Previous books of fiction include The Girl of the Lake, the Kirkus Prize finalist The Remedy for Love, the bestselling Life Among Giants, and the Flannery O’Connor Award–winning collection Big Bend. His memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award in nonfiction and is available in a new paperback edition with its companion volumes Into Woods and Summers with Juliet. Bill has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His last academic job was at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, where he held the William H. P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary American Letters. His craft book, Writing Life Stories, has been in print for twenty-five years. His short work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Ploughshares, Granta, Ecotone, New York magazine, and many more. He lives just up the coast in Maine with two wonderful women, Juliet Karelsen, a painter, and Elysia Roorbach, who studies acting and dance at NYU Tisch. Photo credit: Lauryn Sophia.
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Steven Rowley
I’m Sorry for Your Loss: Writing About Grief – Sunday, 2:30 PM
Steven Rowley is the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus, a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016 and The Editor, named by NPR and Esquire Magazine as one of the Best Books of 2019. His new novel, The Guncle, was hailed by O Magazine as one of the LGBT books changing the literary landscape and it was a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist for Novel of the Year. Rowley’s fiction has been published in twenty languages. Lily and the Octopus is in development as a feature film at Amazon Studios. The Editor was optioned by Twentieth Century for director Greg Berlanti. Feature film rights for The Guncle have been picked up by Lionsgate. Steven has worked as a freelance writer, newspaper columnist and screenwriter. Originally from Portland, Maine, he is a graduate of Emerson College. He currently resides in Palm Springs with his husband, the writer Byron Lane.
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Rebecca Scherm
It’s Getting Hot in Here: Climate Change in Fiction – Saturday, 7:00 PM
Rebecca Scherm is the author of two novels, A House Between Earth and the Moon and Unbecoming. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Michigan and now lives in Palo Alto, California with her family.
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Grace K. Shim
Grace K. Shim grew up in Tulsa Oklahoma as one of two Korean-Americans at her high school (her sister was the other one). Today, Grace writes books with Korean-American protagonists that she wished she had read about as a teen. Grace lives with her husband and three children in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Noh Family is her first novel. You can find her on Twitter at @gracemisplaced1 and on Instagram at gkshimwrites.
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Brendan Nicholaus Slocumb
The Art of the Art-Full Mystery – Sunday, 3:45 PM
Brendan Nicholaus Slocumb was born in Yuba City, California, and was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He was the concertmaster for the University Symphony Orchestra at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and served as the principal violist. He has performed with numerous small chamber ensembles and in the BESK string quartet. For the past twenty-three years, he has been a public and private school music educator, and is a Nobel Educator of Distinction. He also serves as an educational consultant for the Kennedy Center and as the concertmaster for the NOVA-Annandale Symphony Orchestra. Today, Brendan lives in Washington DC. The Violin Conspiracy is his first novel.
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Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Olive, Again; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name Is Lucy Barton; The Burgess Boys; Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine. Photo Credit: Leonardo Cendamo.
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Sarai Walker
Fear and Haunting in the 21st Century: The Gothic Novel Gets an Update – Saturday, 2:15 PM
Sarai Walker is the author of The Cherry Robbers (coming May 2022) and Dietland (May 2015). Dietland has been published in more than a dozen countries and was adapted as a television series for AMC. Sarai has lectured on feminism and body image internationally, and has spoken about these topics widely in the media. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and elsewhere, and she worked as a writer and editor on an updated version of Our Bodies, Ourselves. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College and a PhD in English from the University of London.
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Phoebe Wynne
Fear and Haunting in the 21st Century: The Gothic Novel Gets an Update – Saturday, 2:15 PM
Phoebe Wynne is the author of Madam and The Ruins. She worked in education for nearly a decade and taught Classics in the UK and English language and literature in Paris. She is both British and French, and currently splits her time between England and France.
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Steve Yarbrough
Stay Gone Days: A Conversation with Author Steve Yarbrough – Saturday, 3:30 PM
Steve Yarbrough is the author of twelve books, most recently the novel Stay Gone Days, due out in April 2022. His other books are the nonfiction title Bookmarked: Larry McMurty’s The Last Picture Show, the novels The Unmade World, The Realm of Last Chances, Safe From the Neighbors, The End of California, Prisoners of War, Visible Spirits, and The Oxygen Man, and the short story collections Veneer, Mississippi History, and Family Men. His work has been published in several foreign languages, including Dutch, Italian, Japanese and Polish, and it has also appeared in Ireland, Canada, and the U.K. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the California Book Award, the Richard Wright Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award. He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The Unmade World won the 2019 Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. The son of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers, Steve is currently a professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College. He has two daughters—Lena Yarbrough and Antonina Parris—and is married to the Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. They divide their time between Boston and Krakow. Steve is an aficionado of jazz and bluegrass music, which he plays on guitar, mandolin and banjo, often after midnight.
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Rachel Yoder
Literary Matchmaking: The Author/Agent Relationship – Sunday, 12:15 PM
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Andre Dubus III
Andre Dubus III’s seven books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Gone So Long, has received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal and has been named on many “Best Books” lists, including selection for The Boston Globe’s “Twenty Best Books of 2018” and “The Best Books of 2018”, “Top 100”, Amazon. Mr. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children. Photo credit: John Hauschildt.
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