2007 Fiction Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Linda Barnes

The Mystery of the Serial Sleuths - Saturday 1:00 PM

Born and raised in Detroit, Linda Barnes graduated from Boston University's School of Fine and Applied Arts, then went on to become a drama teacher and director at schools in Chelmsford and Lexington, Massachusetts. Barnes's celebrated Carlotta Carlyle first appeared in 1985 with the award-winning short story “Lucky Penny.” Heart of the World, the most recent Carlyle novel, was published in May 2006.

Among her many honors, in 1985 Barnes won the Anthony Award and nominations for both the Shamus Award and the American Mystery Award for Best Short Story for “Lucky Penny.” In 1987 she received the American Mystery Award for Best Private Eye Novel and nominations for the Edgar, Anthony, and Shamus awards for A Trouble of Fools. Barnes lives near Boston with her husband and son.

Kate Bolick

When Writers Read: Ten Titles Your Book Club Will Love - Saturday 2:00 PM

Kate Bolick is a senior editor at Domino magazine and a contributing writer for the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and Vogue. She lives in Brooklyn.

Dana Cameron

The Mystery of the Serial Sleuths - Saturday 1:00 PM

In addition to her research on colonial New England, professional archaeologist Dana Cameron writes the acclaimed Emma Fielding archaeology mysteries. The sixth book is Ashes and Bones (Avon, 2006). Her first short story, “The Lords of Misrule,” featuring 18th-century London sleuth Margaret Chase, appears in Sugarplums and Scandal (Avon, 2006). Dana is a member of the American Crime Writers League, the Femmes Fatales, Mystery Writers of America, and is a past president of the New England chapter of Sisters in Crime. She lives in Massachusetts with an understanding husband and benevolent feline overlord. (Learn more about Dana at www.danacameron.com.)

Jon Clinch

Finn—A Literary Debut - Saturday 10:00 AM

A native of upstate New York and a graduate of Syracuse University, Jon has taught American Literature, been Creative Director for a major Philadelphia ad agency, and run his own agency in the Philadelphia suburbs. His short stories have appeared in John Gardner's Mss. magazine. He and his wife have one daughter.

His novel Finn, an exploration of the dark secret history of Huckleberry Finn’s father, was recently published by Random House.

Anita Diamant

Anita Diamant Reads from Last Days of Dogtown: A Novel - Saturday 12:00 PM
History Is But a Fable Agreed Upon: Truth in Historical Fiction - Saturday 3:00 PM

Anita Diamant, a Boston-based writer and lecturer, is the author of six nonfiction books about contemporary Jewish life and three novels. Her most recent novel is The Last Days of Dogtown, published in 2005.

Diamant’s first novel, The Red Tent, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1997. A work of historical fiction based on the biblical story of Dinah (Genesis 34), The Red Tent became a word-of-mouth national bestseller, with editions published in 15 countries, including France, England, Germany, Holland, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Korea, Israel, Australia, Denmark, and Lithuania.

Junot Diaz

Going Short - Saturday 9:30 AM
Junot Diaz Reads - Saturday 2:00 PM

Junot Diaz is the author of Drown. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, African Voices, Best American Short Stories (1996, 1997, 1999, and 2000), and in Pushcart Prize XXII. He has received a Eugene McDermott Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, the 2002 Pen/Malamud Award, the 2003 US–Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He is an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Andre Dubus III

Andre Dubus III Reads - Saturday 12:00 PM

Andre Dubus III is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, and the novels Bluesman and House of Sand and Fog. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the Prix de Rome Fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. House of Sand and Fog was a fiction finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, Booksense Book of the Year, and was an Oprah Book Club Selection and New York Times bestseller. Published in thirty countries, it was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connolly.

A member of PEN American Center and the executive board of PEN New England, Dubus has taught writing at Harvard University, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. He and his wife live in Massachusetts with their three children.

Todd Field

Fiction into Film - Saturday 3:30 PM

Todd Field began making motion pictures in 1985 when he was cast by Woody Allen in Radio Days. He went on to work with some of America's greatest film makers including Stanley Kubrick, Victor Nuñez, and Carl Franklin. Franklin and Nuñez encouraged Field to enroll as a directing fellow at the American Film Institute (AFI), which he did in 1992. Since that time he has received the Franklin J. Schaffner Fellow Award from the AFI, the Satyajit Ray Award from the British Film Institute, a Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival, and his short films have been exhibited at various venues overseas and domestically at the Museum of Modern Art.

Field became one of Hollywood's hottest new writer/directors with the release of In the Bedroom, a film based on a short story by Andre Dubus. For Field's work on In the Bedroom, he was named Director of the Year by the National Board of Review, and his script was awarded Best Screenplay. The film went on to win Best Picture of the Year from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the New York Film Critics Circle awarded Best First Film to Field. In the Bedroom also received six AFI, three Golden Globe, and five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture of the Year.

In 2006, Field cowrote and directed Little Children, based on a novel by Tom Perrotta. For this film, director Field and Perrotta intended to take the story in a separate and somewhat different direction than the novel. The film, starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connolly, and Jackie Earl Haley, is set in an upper-middle class bedroom community outside of Boston, and tells the story of several seemingly unrelated characters and how their lives connect in surprising, and potentially dangerous, ways. Little Children won numerous awards from the nation's critics associations including writing awards for Field and Perrotta. The movie received three Golden Globe nominations including Best Picture of the Year, and was nominated for three Academy Awards.

Julia Glass

When Writers Read: Ten Titles Your Book Club Will Love - Saturday 2:00 PM
Dessert with Julia Glass: A Literary Tea with the Author of The Whole World Over
- Saturday 4:00 PM

Julia Glass is a fiction writer and freelance journalist who has written magazine articles and essays on a variety of topics. She was awarded the 2002 National Book Award for Fiction for her book, Three Junes, her first novel. A fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for 2004–2005, she is also the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in fiction writing (2000) and several prizes for her short stories, including three Nelson Algren Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award, and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Medal for Best Novella. Her newest book is The Whole World Over, published in 2006. She lives in Massachusetts.

Christopher Golden

Dark Fantasy and The Borderkind - Saturday 2:30 PM

Christopher Golden is the award-winning, bestselling author of such novels as The Myth Hunters, Wildwood Road, The Boys Are Back in Town, The Ferryman, Strangewood, Of Saints and Shadows, and the Body of Evidence series of teen thrillers. Working with actress/writer/ director Amber Benson, he cocreated and cowrote Ghosts of Albion, an animated supernatural drama for BBC online (www.ghostsofalbion.net), from which they created the book series of the same name.

With Thomas E. Sniegoski, he is the coauthor of the dark fantasy series The Menagerie as well as the young readers fantasy series OutCast and the comic book miniseries Talent, both of which were recently acquired by Universal Pictures. Golden and Sniegoski also wrote the graphic novel BPRD: Hollow Earth, a spinoff from the fan-favorite comic book series Hellboy. Golden authored the original Hellboy novels, The Lost Army and The Bones of Giants, and edited two Hellboy short story anthologies.

Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He graduated from Tufts University. His latest novel is The Borderkind, part two of a dark fantasy trilogy for Bantam Books entitled The Veil. This fall, Bantam will publish the lavishly illustrated gothic novel Baltimore, or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, a collaboration with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. More than eight million copies of his books are in print. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com

Áine Greaney

Going Short - Saturday 9:30 AM
Áine Greaney Reads from The Sheepbreeders Dance and Other Stories
- Saturday 3:30 PM

Áine Greaney was born and brought up in County Mayo, Ireland, then moved to the U.S. in 1986. After living in upstate New York, where she completed a masters in English, she now lives and writes in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

In Fall 2006, her short fiction collection, The Sheepbreeders Dance was published by Flume Press, (Cal. State U.). Her personal essays and short fiction have been published in various American and Irish literary journals and magazines. Her debut novel, The Big House (2003) was published by TownHouse, Dublin, and Simon & Schuster, UK. Her second novel, Dance Lessons, is under consideration for publication in London.

Among her writing awards, recognition, and shortlists are the 2000 Frank O’Connor Short Fiction Award (grand prize winner), the Irish News, the Steinbeck Award, and the Hennessy Award for New Irish Writing. For more information about Greaney and her work, visit www.ainegreaney.com/.

Jennifer Haigh

Going Short - Saturday 9:30 AM
When Writers Read: Ten Titles Your Book Club Will Love - Saturday 2:00 PM

Jennifer Haigh's first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her second, Baker Towers, won the 2006 PEN/L. L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, Five Points, Virginia Quarterly Review, Good Housekeeping, and many other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she teaches in the graduate program in creative writing at Boston University. Her third novel, The Condition, will be published by HarperCollins in 2008.

Dyke Hendrickson

The Mystery of the Serial Sleuths - Saturday 1:00 PM

Dyke Hendrickson is a journalist who covers cutting-edge medical research, often at MIT and the Harvard teaching hospitals. He is the author of two books, Last Night in Hollywood, a novel, and Quiet Presence: Stories of Franco-Americans in New England, a social history.

Michael Lowenthal

Michael Lowenthal Reads from Charity Girl - Saturday 11:00 AM
History Is But a Fable Agreed Upon: Truth in Historical Fiction - Saturday 3:00 PM

Michael Lowenthal is the author of Charity Girl (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). The novel, set in 1918, is based on a disturbing but little-remembered episode in American history, when the government, claiming special wartime powers to protect the military, arrested and incarcerated 15,000 women who had venereal disease. The women—American citizens—were held indefinitely, without formal charges, in federally funded detention centers. Lowenthal is the author of two previous novels: Avoidance (Graywolf Press, 2002) and The Same Embrace (Dutton, 1998). His stories have appeared in the Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and Tin House, and have been widely anthologized, most recently in Best New American Voices 2005 and Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge. The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Wesleyan writers' conferences, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, Lowenthal teaches creative writing at Boston College and in the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. He also serves on the Executive Board of PEN New England. For more information, visit www.MichaelLowenthal.com.

Archer Mayor

Archer Mayor Reads from The Second Mouse - Saturday 11:30 AM
The Mystery of the Serial Sleuths - Saturday 1:00 PM

Archer Mayor's Joe Gunther, Vermont-based detective series is one of the most enduring and critically acclaimed police procedural series being written today and the books have been published in five languages. Mayor’s latest is entitled The Second Mouse. He is the 2004 winner of the New England Booksellers Association/NEBA award for best fiction—the first time a writer of crime literature has been so honored. The Chicago Tribune calls the Joe Gunther series “the best police procedurals being written in America.”

Mayor is also a death investigator for Vermont's Chief Medical Examiner, a part-time police officer for the Bellows Falls Police Department, a volunteer firefighter, and the EMT captain of his local rescue squad. For years, Mayor has integrated actual police methodology with intricately detailed plot lines in novels the New York Times has called “dazzling,” and Booklist has said are “among the best cop stories being written today.” Mayor and his family live in Vermont.

Claire Messud

Claire Messud Reads from “The Emperor’s Children” - Saturday 10:00 AM

Claire Messud’s first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and named Editor’s Choice by The Village Voice. All three books were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her newest novel, the widely praised The Emperor's Children, was nominated for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2006. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and the Straus Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Educated at Yale and Cambridge, she now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Will Murphy

Finn—A Literary Debut - Saturday 10:00 AM

Will Murphy graduated from UC Berkeley where he studied English literature. A Senior Editor at Random House, he acquires both fiction and serious nonfiction. His authors include Bernard-Henry Levy, Jeff Shaara, Jan Gross, Senator Joseph Biden, Mark Halperin, Timothy Garton Ash, and of course Jon Clinch.

Tom Perrotta

Fiction into Film - Saturday 3:30 PM

Tom Perrotta is the author of five works of fiction, Bad Haircut, The Wishbones, Joe College, Election (made into the acclaimed 1999 movie with Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon), and, most recently, Little Children (made into the highly praised 2006 movie directed by Todd Field and starring Kate Winslet). Perrotta has worked as a screenwriter and a journalist, writing for several major publications including the New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, and GQ. He has taught writing at Yale and Harvard. He lives with his family outside Boston.

Frank Schaeffer

Frank Schaeffer Reads from Baby Jack - Saturday 2:00 PM

Frank Schaeffer is a survivor of both polio and an evangelical/ fundamentalist childhood. An acclaimed writer who overcame severe dyslexia, he is a home-schooled and self-taught documentary movie director, a feature film director and producer of four (“pretty terrible”) low-budget Hollywood features, and a bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. Frank’s three semi-biographical novels about growing up in a fundamentalist mission include Portofino, Zermatt, and Saving Grandma. He has published to high acclaim two nonfiction books, Keeping Faith and Faith of Our Sons, which portray Frank's relationship with his Marine son during basic training and the war in Afghanistan,

His latest novel, Baby Jack, about the Marines, sacrifice, God, and the class division between who serves and who does not, was published in October 2006.

Anne Easter Smith

Anne Easter Smith Reads from A Rose for the Crown - Saturday 11:00 AM
History Is But a Fable Agreed Upon: Truth in Historical Fiction - Saturday 3:00 PM

Anne Easter Smith is a native of England who has lived in the United States for 33 years. Her love of English history goes back to age 10, when the British education system mandated history as part of the curriculum through graduation.  Her first novel, A Rose for the Crown, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2006, and is now in translation in German. Anne began her writing career as a freelancer for a small monthly publication in Plattsburgh, New York, and from 1986 until 1995 was the features editor of the city’s daily newspaper. Her second book, Daughter of York, will be out in February 2008, and two more books about the House of York during the Wars of the Roses will follow, all contracted to Simon & Schuster.