2008 Nonfiction Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Keith Ablow, MD

Investigating Crimes of the Century - Saturday 2:00 PM

Keith Ablow, MD, is a New York Times bestselling author, Fox News psychiatry correspondent, frequent Today Show on-camera expert, contributing editor for Good Housekeeping, and repeat Oprah guest. Dr. Ablow’s essays on human emotion and behavior have been published by the Annals of Internal Medicine, The New York Times, USA Today, Discover, U.S. News and World Report, Good Housekeeping (where he is a contributing editor), Cosmopolitan, and many other national publications. Dr. Ablow graduated from Brown University and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and is on the faculty of New England Medical Center in Boston. In addition to his bestselling nonfiction book Inside the Mind of Scott Peterson, he is the author of six bestselling crime novels, all of which feature a forensic psychiatrist who solves mysteries beyond the grasp of other investigators.

Emerson Baker

Emerson Baker II reads The Devil of Great Island, Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England - Saturday 9:00 AM

Emerson “Tad” Baker is a professor of history at Salem State College. He is the award-winning author of numerous books and articles on the history and archaeology of early New England. He was a consultant and on-camera expert for the PBS-TV series Colonial House and has appeared on other shows, including The History Channel’s This Week in History. He has also consulted for National Geographic, the National Park Service, Parks Canada, Plimoth Plantation, and many other cultural organizations.

Robert Finch

Robert Finch Reads from The Iambics of Newfoundland:
Notes from an Unknown Shore - Saturday 9:00 AM
Our Fragile World - Saturday 11:30 AM

Robert Finch has published seven books of essays, most recently The Iambics of Newfoundland: Notes from an Unknown Shore (Counterpoint Press, 2007). He also edited A Place Apart: A Cape Cod Reader and co-edited (with John Elder) The Norton Book of Nature Writing. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals and has been widely anthologized. In October 2005 Finch began producing weekly radio commentaries for WCAI, an NPR affiliate of Boston’s WGBH public radio station, and in 2005 he received the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for Radio Writing. He has taught at numerous colleges and writers conferences and is currently on the nonfiction faculty of the MFA program in writing at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. He lives in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, with his wife, the writer Kathy Shorr, and spends summers in Newfoundland.

Lucia Greene

Passages Women Remember - Saturday 1:00 PM

Lucia Greene is a freelance magazine and web journalist under contract with both People magazine and America’s Promise, a national nonprofit working to improve the lives of at-risk children. She and her husband have three children and split their time between Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Woodbridge, Connecticut.

Martha Hodes

Herstory: Women Writing About Women - Saturday 2:30 PM

Martha Hodes, a professor of history at New York University, is the author of The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century, which was an alternate selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Guild, and Quality Paperback Book Club; it was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize and was named a Best Book of 2006 by Library Journal. She is also the author of White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, which won the Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History. She has edited a collection of essays titled Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Hodes received her PhD from Princeton University and also holds degrees from Harvard University and Bowdoin College. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library, and the Whiting Foundation. She serves as advisor for a variety of film projects, including a documentary feature-in-progress about lynching in America and the PBS-TV series History Detectives. She lives in New York City and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Kevin M. Lyons

Reading and Literature: Catalysts of Culture - Saturday 11:30 AM

Dr. Kevin M. Lyons (moderator) has been interested in literacy education since his practice teaching experience with high school students in 1974. That experience, he says, “shook my understanding about how well average high school students read and process information.” After several years teaching reading at the elementary and middle school levels, he spent many years at Suffolk University and Boston College teaching teachers at the master’s and doctoral levels about effective literacy practices. Since July 2006 he has been superintendent of Newburyport public schools.

Mirta Ojito

The Latino Boom - Saturday 10:00 AM
Passages Women Remember - Saturday 1:00 PM

Mirta Ojito, who was born in Cuba, came to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift when she was 16. Her first book, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus, was published in 2006 by Penguin. Her writing has been published in a number of anthologies and has received several awards, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ writing award for best foreign reporting in 1999 for a series of articles about life in Cuba, and a shared Pulitzer for national reporting in 2001 for a New York Times series of articles about race in America. She has taught journalism at New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Miami. In January 2007 she joined the full-time faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University as a visiting professor. She continues to write for the New York Times from New York, where she lives with her husband, Arturo Villar, and their three boys.

Diane Rapaport

Diane Rapaport reads The Naked Quaker: True Crimes and Controversies from the Courts of Colonial New England - Saturday 2:00 PM

Diane Rapaport is a former trial lawyer who has made a new career as an award-winning author and speaker. Her new book, The Naked Quaker: True Crimes and Controversies from the Courts of Colonial New England (Commonwealth Editions, October 2007), is a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award for History. The Naked Quaker brings history to life with true court cases—amusing, poignant, and sometimes shocking—about our feisty colonial ancestors. (The title story involves a Quaker woman who walked into Puritan Sunday meeting—right here in 17th-century Newburyport—and dropped her dress as a protest tactic!) Diane’s first book, New England Court Records: A Research Guide for Genealogists and Historians (Quill Pen Press, 2006), won three Benjamin Franklin Awards in 2007 from PMA, the Independent Book Publishers Association—Best History Book, Best Reference Book, and finalist for Best New Voice in Nonfiction. Diane also writes for magazines, including her popular “Tales from the Courthouse” column for New England Ancestors (journal of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston). Diane lives in Lexington, Massachusetts. Visit her website at www.Diane-Rapaport.com.

Cheryl Richardson

From Brainstorm to Bookstore - Saturday 1:00 PM

Cheryl Richardson is the author of New York Times bestselling books Take Time for Your Life, Life Makeovers, Stand Up for Your Life and The Unmistakable Touch of Grace. As a professional coach and speaker, her work has been covered widely in the media including “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” the New York Times, USA Today, Good Housekeeping, and O Magazine. Cheryl was the team leader for the Lifestyle Makeover Series on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” and she accompanied Ms. Winfrey on the "Live Your Best Life" nationwide tour.

Cheryl served as the producer and host of "The Life Makeover Project with Cheryl Richardson" on the Oxygen Network, and as producer and host of two Public Television Specials: "Stand Up for Your Life" and "Create an Abundant Life." She writes a monthly column for Martha Stewart's Body & Soul Magazine, and hosts her own Internet talk-radio show called “Coach on Call” on hayhouseradio.com. Cheryl also hosts a large online community at www.cherylrichardson.com.

Victoria Rowell

Passages Women Remember - Saturday 1:00 PM
Victoria Rowell Reads from The Women Who Raised Me - Saturday 4:00 PM

Born in Portland, Maine, Victoria Rowell was raised in foster care for 18 years. She trained as a dancer for eight years before turning professional and dancing with various companies, including the American Ballet Theatre II and the Twyla Tharp Workshop. After dancing, she pursued a career in modeling and graced the pages of Seventeen and Mademoiselle magazines. Modeling led to acting, and she has appeared on both primetime and daytime television as well as feature films. In 1990 she founded the Rowell Foster Children’s Positive Plan, a nonprofit that provides foster children and youth with scholarships and job placement assistance, and she has been recognized by several organizations for her advocacy efforts on behalf of foster and adopted children. Her memoir, The Women Who Raised Me, received an African American Literary Award in the Biography/Memoir category and an NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Debut Author category. Currently she is on a whistle-stop book tour of New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Boston; Atlanta; Savannah; Toronto, Canada; Tortola, British Virgin Islands; and India, among other places.

William Sargent

Our Fragile World - Saturday 11:30 AM
William Sargent Reads from Just Seconds from the Ocean - Saturday 3:00 PM

William Sargent is a consultant for PBS’s NOVA series. His books include The House on Ipswich Marsh (UPNE, 2005), Crab Wars: A Tale of Horseshoe Crabs, Bioterrorism, and Human Health (UPNE, 2002), and A Year in the Notch: Exploring the Natural History of the White Mountains (UPNE, 2001). Formerly director of the Baltimore Aquarium and a research assistant at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Sargent has taught at the Briarwood Marine Science Center and at Harvard University. He lives in Ipswich.

Frank Schaeffer

Memoirs on Fatherhood: From Family to Faith and Fly-Fishing - Saturday 9:00 AM

Frank Schaeffer is a successful fiction and nonfiction writer. His book Keeping the Faith: A Father-Son Story about Love and the U.S. Marine Corps was a New York Times extended list bestseller, and his Calvin Becker trilogy of novels explores the dilemmas of members of the Christian fundamentalist community. His latest book is Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back (Da Capo Press, 2007).

Stephanie Schorow

Investigating Crimes of the Century - Saturday 2:00 PM

Stephanie Schorow is a Boston-area reporter and writer. For 12 years she toiled as a features editor and ink-stained scribe for Boston Herald until she struck out on her own as a freelance writer in 2004. Her articles now regularly appear in the Boston Globe and other publications. She is the author of the just-published nonfiction book The Crime of the Century: How the Brink’s Robbers Stole Millions and the Hearts of Boston. Her other books include Boston on Fire: A History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston and The Cocoanut Grove Fire. All three were published by Commonwealth Editions. Ms. Schorow was the editor of Boston’s Fire Trail: A Walk Through the City’s Fire and Firefighting History and contributed research and copy to Great New England Storms of the 20th Century, both published in 2007. She is currently working on a book on the Boston Harbor Islands that is scheduled to be published in June by The History Press.

Lou Ureneck

Memoirs on Fatherhood: From Family to Faith and Fly-Fishing - Saturday 9:00 AM

Lou Ureneck teaches journalism and serves as chair of the journalism department at Boston University. He has worked at newspapers in Providence, Rhode Island; Portland, Maine; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ureneck was a Nieman Fellow and editor-in-residence at Harvard University in 1994-95 and a Barach Fellow in nonfiction writing at the Wesleyan Writers Conference in 1995. His memoir  Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska, tells the story of a wilderness trip he took with son following his divorce. It won a 2007 National Outdoor Book Award and was named a book-of-the-month pick by National Geographic Traveler.

Maryanne Wolf

Reading and Literature: Catalysts of Culture - Saturday 11:30 AM

Maryanne Wolf is director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and a professor of child development in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development. She received her doctorate from Harvard University’s Department of Human Development and Psychology in the Graduate School of Education, where she began her work on the neurological underpinnings of reading, language, and dyslexia. Dr. Wolf has received a Distinguished Scholarship Award from Tufts, the Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award from the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and the National Teaching Award for Four-Year Universities from the American Psychological Association. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Germany, where she conducted research on dyslexia in German-speaking children. Her research in collaboration with Dr. Pat Bowers concerns an expanded conceptualization of developmental dyslexia called the Double-Deficit Hypothesis, which was the subject of a special issue of the Journal of Learning Disabilities. Along with colleagues Dr. Robin Morris and Dr. Maureen Lovett, Dr. Wolf has earned a NICHD Shannon Award for Innovative Research and several multi-year NICHD grants to investigate new approaches to reading intervention. She has received the Norman Geschwind Lecture Award from the International Dyslexia Association for neuroscience research in dyslexia. She recently received the Marek Award from the New York International Dyslexia Association for best book on reading. She has edited a book titled Dyslexia, Fluency, and the Brain and is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, published by Harper-Collins. (Photo by Kathleen Dooher)