2010 Nonfiction Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Dr. Regina Barreca

Gina Barreca reads from Its Not That I’m Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World - Saturday 10:00 AM

Dr. Regina Barreca is most recently the author of It's Not That I'm Bitter: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World (St. Martin’s, 2009), and has appeared on 20/20, The Today Show, CNN, Dr. Phil and Oprah to discuss gender, power, politics, and humor. Her earlier books, include the bestselling They Used to Call Me Snow White But I Drifted: Women's Strategic Use of Humor, as well as Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even and Babes n Boyland: A Personal History of Coeducation in the Ivy League; her books have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and German. Dr. Barreca is Professor of English and Feminist Theory at the University of Connecticut. www.ginabarreca.com

Sven Birkerts

Memoir as Epiphany - Saturday 4:00 PM

Sven Birkerts has been editor of AGNI since July 2002. He has received grants from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was winner of the Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle in 1985 and the Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award from PEN for the best book of essays in 1990. Birkerts has reviewed regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, Esquire, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Mirabella, Parnassus, The Yale Review, and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, Amherst College, and Mt. Holyoke College, and is director of the graduate Bennington Writing Seminars. Birkerts is the author eight books including My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time (Viking, 2002) and Then, Again: The Art of Time in the Memoir (Graywolf, 2008). He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

Nancy Carlisle

Nancy Carlisle reads from America’s Kitchens - Saturday 2:30 PM

Nancy Carlisle has been a curator for more than twenty years at Historic New England where she works with some of the most important historic kitchens in the country. Ms. Carlisle, author of Cherished Possessions: A New England Legacy, has written and lectured widely on the material culture of domestic life from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. In her new book, America’s Kitchens, co-authored with Melinda Narardinov, Ms. Carlisle tells the story of the nation’s kitchens from New England hearths, to Victorian kitchens isolated at the back of the house, to open plan kitchens of 1950s suburbs.

Elyssa East

Elyssa East reads from Dogtown:
Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town - Saturday 1:00 PM

Elyssa East received her BA in art history from Reed College, and her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University’s School of the Arts where she was the recipient of three prestigious fellowships. Her writing has been published in New England regional magazines, and she was a nonfiction reviews editor at Publishers Weekly. From 2006 to 2009, she coordinated KGB’s Faculty Selects reading series in conjunction with Columbia’s MFA program. Elyssa East first discovered Dogtown—3,000 abandoned acres in Gloucester, Massachusetts—through the arresting landscapes of the American Modernist Marsden Hartley. In Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town, East explores the enigmatic past that makes this area so fascinating while structuring her story around a senseless 1984 murder that occurred there. Photo by Melissa Heltzel.

Ellen Fitzpatrick

Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation - Saturday 10:30 AM

Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor and scholar specializing in modern American political and intellectual history, is the author and editor of six books and has appeared regularly on PBS’s “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.” She received her PhD in history from Brandeis University and has been interviewed as an expert on modern American political history by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, Washington Post, CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and National Public Radio. She has recently released Letters To Jackie, the first book to ever examine the extraordinary collection of condolence letters to Jacqueline Kennedy. Fitzpatrick creates an incredible portrait of the nation’s grief from such a cross-section of American life. The Carpenter Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, where she has been recognized for Excellence in Public Service, Ellen Fitzpatrick lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
Photo by Lisa Nugent.

Charlotte Gordon

Getting Hooked on History - Saturday 2:30 PM

Charlotte Gordon has written two books of poetry (When the Grateful Dead Came to St. Louis and Two Girls on a Raft), a biography of the 17th century poet, Anne Bradstreet (Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet, Little, Brown, 2005), and a non-fiction retelling of the famous biblical story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar (The Woman Who Named God: Abraham's Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths, Little Brown, 2009). An award winning author and speaker, she is a graduate of Harvard and Boston Universities and has been featured on NPR's "Weekend Edition," CBC's "The Current" as well as many other radio and television programs. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. She can be reached at http://www.charlottegordonbooks.com

Drew Hendrickson

Thieves in the Temple - Saturday 2:30 PM

Drew Hendrickson is studying theology and social justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He has experience working with refugee communities in South America and Africa. He also worked with families from Central and South America while he coordinated youth programs for public school students in Boston.

Ann Kingman

Books On The Nightstand: A Conversation About Books And Reading
- Saturday 1:00 PM

Ann Kingman is co-publisher of Books on the Nightstand: a blog and podcast about books and reading. Always an avid reader, Ann spends her days as a District Sales Manager for Random House, Inc., working with  bookstores to find just the right books for their customers.

Michael Kindness

Books On The Nightstand: A Conversation About Books And Reading
- Saturday 1:00 PM

Michael Kindness has been a reader his whole life and has worked in bookselling and publishing for the last 25 years. For the last two years he has worked on the blog and podcast Books on the Nightstand, with his friend and colleague Ann Kingman. Michael lives in Rhode Island with his wife and two sons.

G. Jeffrey MacDonald

Thieves in the Temple - Saturday 2:30 PM

G. Jeffrey MacDonald is an award-winning journalist and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. His reporting has appeared in five other books as well as TIME magazine, Condé Nast Traveler, USA Today and the Washington Post, among other national publications. For in-depth coverage of religion, he’s received six awards from the Religion Newswriters Association and the American Academy of Religion. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, he works as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the Religion News Service. His new book, Thieves in the Temple: The Christian Church and the Selling of the American Soul, goes on sale from Basic Books on April 1, 2010. He lives in Newburyport.

Marla Miller

A Stitch in Time: Marla Miller reads from Betsy Ross and the Making of America
- Saturday 9:00 AM

Marla Miller’s primary research interest is U.S. women’s work before industrialization. Her first book, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, appeared from the University of Massachusetts Press in August 2006, and won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award for the best book in the field for that year. Her essay “My Part Alone: the World of Rebecca Dickinson” won the Walter Muir Whitehill prize in Early American History from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and her essay “Dressmaking as a Trade for Women: Rediscovering a Lost Art(isanry)” was part of the prizewinning volume A Separate Sphere: Cincinnati Dressmakers, 1880-1920, Cynthia Amneus, ed., (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Museum of Art, 2003), awarded the Ruth Emery Book Prize from The Victorian Society of America, presented to an outstanding book on the arts or architecture created of the Victorian period. Her latest book, Betsy Ross and the Making of America, is the first scholarly biography of America’s best-known and most-misunderstood seamstress. Millions have heard the story of the supposed making of the nation’s first flag as a protest movement over imperial tax policy blossomed into a full-on rebellion, but few know the life behind the legend of this iconic American.

Holly Robinson

Holly Robinson Reads from The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter - Saturday 11:00 AM

Holly Robinson is a journalist whose work appears regularly in national magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Ladies' Home Journal, More, Parents and Shape. Her first book, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter: A Memoir, was published by Harmony Books in May 2009 and will be released in paperback in June 2010. Ms. Robinson holds a B.A. in biology from Clark University and an M.F.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She and her husband live north of Boston with their five children.

Frank Schaeffer

Frank Schaeffer reads from Patience With God:
Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism) - Saturday 1:00 AM

Frank Schaeffer is the author of the New York Times bestseller Keeping Faith and, most recently, the memoir Crazy for God. He has appeared on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. In Patience with God, Schaeffer offers a middle ground for those who find right-wing evangelists as distasteful as the uber-liberal lefties who mock them. As Schaeffer explains, there are a whole bunch of people out there—Republican and Democrat—who are disgusted with the polarizing forces that exist in our nation, and who believe (or at least try to believe) in God. And there are stats to back his view, with the most recent American Religious Identification Survey showing 85% of the country adheres to some form of religion.  A prolific blogger for the Huffington Post, he and his wife, Genie, live in Massachusetts and have three children.

Doug Stewart

The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly - Saturday 10:30 AM

Doug Stewart is a freelance journalist who lives and works in Ipswich. He writes regularly about history and the arts for Smithsonian Magazine, which has published more than 60 of his stories. An article he wrote for Smithsonian in 2006, "To Be or Not To Be Shakespeare," on the so-called authorship controversy drew more letters than any story he has ever written. A former book and magazine editor, Stewart has also written for Time, Discover, Geo, Muse, and Connoisseur.  The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare is his first book.

Richard E. Welch III

Closing Ceremony Honoring The Writer’s Life - Saturday 7:00 PM

Richard E. Welch III, a former federal prosecutor, is now a Justice of the Superior Court for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He has published numerous articles on a wide range of topics including: constitutional law, trial practice, fly fishing, and the novelist John P. Marquand.

Jonathan Yardley

The Enduring Marquand - Saturday 9:00 AM

Jonathan Yardley is a 1961 graduate of the University of North Carolina, where he was editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, in 1960-61. From 1961 to 1964 he worked at The New York Times, first as intern to its bureau chief in Washington, James Reston, then as a writer at the News of the Week in Review in New York. He is the author of six books including Our Kind of People: The Story of an American Family and Monday Morning Quarterback. Yardley lives in Washington D.C. with his wife, Marie Arana, and is currently the book critic for the Washington Post.