Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry | Moderators |
Listed in alphabetical order

Mateo Askaripour
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Mateo Askaripour wants people to feel seen. His first novel, Black Buck, takes on racism in corporate America with humor and wit. It was an instant New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna Today show book club pick. Askaripour was chosen as one of Entertainment Weekly’s “10 rising stars poised to make waves” and was named as a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” prize. This Great Hemisphere is his second novel. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Jane Brox
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Jane Brox‘s In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy (Godine, 2024) brings together her first three books: Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award in nonfiction; Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Clearing Land. She is also the author of Silence, selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review, and Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, which was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2010 by Time magazine. Brox has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, The Georgia Review and NewYorker.com. She has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Maine Arts Commission. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.
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Cebo Campbell
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Cebo Campbell is an author and creative director based in Brooklyn, New York. Winner of the Linda L. Ross Creative Writing Award and the Stories Award for Poetry, Cebo’s work has been featured in numerous publications. Cebo is the co-founder of the award-winning creative agency, Spherical, where he leads a team of creatives in shaping the best hotel brands in the world. Sky Full of Elephants is his debut novel.
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Essie Chambers
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Ron Currie
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Ron Currie is the author of four novels. He has won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award, the Alex Award, and the Pushcart Prize. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, and his short fiction and nonfiction have received recognition in Best American anthologies. As a screenwriter he worked most recently on the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations and has developed projects with AMC Studios, Amblin Television, and ITV America. He lives in Portland, Maine and teaches in the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program. Photo credit: Tristan Spinski.
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KJ Dell’Antonia
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
KJ Dell’Antonia is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels The Chicken Sisters, Playing the Witch Card, and In Her Boots, and the non-fiction book How to Be a Happier Parent, all of which center around the same themes: the challenge of figuring out what makes us happy, the need to value the life we’re living more than the one in our phones and laptops, and the irritating fact that nothing, not reality TV, not literary fraud, not even witchcraft, will solve our problems for us. She is also the former editor of the New York Times’ parenting section, then called Motherlode, the co-host of the #AmWriting podcast, and a passionate bookstagrammer (@kjda). She lives in Lyme, New Hampshire with her husband and an ever-evolving cast of children, dogs, cats, chickens, horses and houseguests. Photo credit: Kate Seymour Photography.
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Sara Reish Desmond
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Sara Reish Desmond grew up in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a small community nested among the Appalachian mountains and surrounded by Amish communities. She earned a BA in English from Kenyon College and her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Kenyon Review, and Water~Stone Review, among other publications. Her short stories have been finalists for the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Prize and The Copper Nickel Award. She is fascinated by liminal characters and experiences and has written a collection of stories centered on that idea called What We Might Become, out now from Cornerstone Press. She recently completed a novel about grief and redemption set in the rural Pennsylvania of her upbringing. She teaches and lives just north of Boston with her husband and two daughters. Photo credit: Kait Astrella.
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Alison Espach
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Elizabeth Graver
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Susanna Kwan
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Dana Alison Levy
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Dana Alison Levy is the author of the critically acclaimed and beloved Family Fletcher books and It Wasn’t Me, as well as the noteworthy nonfiction titles Breaking the Mold and Allies. Her most recent title is Not Another Banned Book. Levy’s books have been bestsellers, garnered starred reviews, been named to countless “best of” lists, and been Junior Library Guild Gold Star Selections. Some of them have also been banned. When she’s not writing, Dana can be found reading banned books and smashing the patriarchy.
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Tova Mirvis
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Namrata Patel
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Amy Poeppel
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Benjamin Resnick
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Benjamin Resnick is the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in New York. Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he lives in Pelham with his family. Next Stop is his first novel. Photo credit: Dr. Kenneth Resnick.
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J. Courtney Sullivan
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Maggie Thrash
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
MAGGIE THRASH is the author of the critically acclaimed graphic memoirs Honor Girl, which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Lost Soul, Be at Peace, as well as two novels for young adults. Rainbow Black is her first novel for adults, and was a finalist for the New England Book Prize. Born and raised in Atlanta, she lives in New Hampshire.
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Dawn Tripp
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Dawn Tripp is the nationally bestselling author of the novel JACKIE and the novel GEORGIA, finalist for the New England Book Award and winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature. Praised by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, People Magazine, and others, Jackie is described by author Chris Bohjalian as a “brilliant, beautiful book that touches the soul in ways conventional biographies can’t.” Tripp is the author of three previous novels: GAME OF SECRETS, MOON TIDE, and THE SEASON OF OPEN WATER, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Conjunctions, AGNI, and NPR. She serves on the executive board of the Boston Book Festival and on the board of Gnome Surf: a non-profit surf therapy organization focused on creating a culture shift towards kindness, love, and acceptance for athletes of all abilities. She lives in Westport, Massachusetts with her sons. Photo credit: Ivan Tripp.
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Joan Wickersham
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Joan Wickersham is the author of No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck, The News from Spain, and The Suicide Index, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in many magazines as well as in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has read her work on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “On Point,” and is a regular contributor to The Boston Globe, where her op-ed column has been running for the past 15 years. Photo credit: Thomas Wickersham.
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Maria Zoccola
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. Her debut poetry collection, Helen of Troy, 1993, reimagines the Homeric Helen as a dissatisfied housewife living in small-town Tennessee in the early nineties, and was published by Scribner on January 14, 2025. Maria’s work has previously appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Maria has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University, and spent many years managing programming for a youth leadership and social justice nonprofit.
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Jane Roper
Napa, Nantucket, and North Carolina: The Power of Place — Saturday 1:00 PM
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Lauren Grodstein
Testimony: Stories of World War II — Sunday 1:00 PM
Lauren Grodstein is the author of five novels, including the Read with Jenna selection We Must Not Think of Ourselves, New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family and the Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything. Lauren’s work has been translated into French, Turkish, German, Hebrew, and other languages, and her essays and reviews have been widely published. She teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in New Jersey with her husband and children.
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Ann Hood
The Ocean State Comes to the Bay State — Saturday 11:30 AM
Ann Hood is the author of over a dozen novels, including the bestsellers The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most. Her debut novel, the bestseller Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, has been in print since 1987. She has also written five memoirs, including Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which is the story of the death of her five-year-old daughter Grace from a virulent form of strep in 2002. The book was a NYT Editors’ Choice and was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food and Wine, Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and many more.
She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing awards, a Best American Travel Writing award, and a Best American Spiritual Writing award. Hood’s most recent book is her memoir, Fly Girl, which is about her eight years as a TWA flight attendant from the late 70s to the mid-80s, spanning the Golden Age of Flying through deregulation and the beginning of vast system wide changes.
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