Lynne Cox

LYNNE COX is a local celebrity – a long distance swimmer who lives in Los Alamitos, California. Her memoir, Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer is about her many incredible swims and her relentless drive “to establish bridges between borders.” Her understated style makes for gripping reading. Her memoir is about exploring the impossible and doing it!

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Karen Joy Fowler

KAREN JOY FOWLER introduces six notable characters in The Jane Austen Book Club; each with his or her own “private Austen,” each addressing very contemporary social issues. In sublimely comedic prose, Fowler takes readers on a journey of love, laughter, pain and Jane. Along with this most recent novel, which spent over three months on The New York Times bestseller list, Fowler has authored two short story collections and three novels.

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Lisa Glatt

LISA GLATT’s A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That explores the complex and all-too-human world of Rachel Spark, a thirty-something college instructor, and her wildly life-affirming mother, who has been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. “Far more celebration than wake,” raves Elle magazine, this novel has been widely praised in many publications, including The New York Times Book Review. Lisa Glatt is a Long Beach writer.

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Dr. Perri Klass

DR. PERRY KLASS is the award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, The Mystery of Breathing, Love and Modern Medicine and A Not Entirely Benign Procedure. She is also a pediatrician who is medical director of the national literary program Reach Out and Read dedicated to promoting literacy as part of pediatric primary care.

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Margaret Maron

MARGARET MARON writes the Judge Deborah Knott mystery series, situated in her native North Carolina, as well as the Detective Sigrid Harald of NYPD series, short stories and non-mystery novels. Publishers Weekly calls Maron “one of the most seamless Southern writers since Margaret Mitchell.” Long Beach Public Library lists twenty-two of her titles.

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Maile Meloy

MAILE MELOY’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best New American Voices. The New York Times Book Review describes her collection of short stories, Half in Love, as “lean, and controlled in their narration and abundant and moving in their effects.” She captures vibrant moments in life as her characters experience desire, fear and mystery. Her debut novel, Liars and Saints is a multigenerational saga of the Catholic Santerre family.

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Lalita Tademy

LALITA TADEMY, in her debut novel, Cane River, recounts with compelling detail the lives of her matriarchal ancestors who were born into slavery in pre-Civil War Louisiana. Tademy describes her historical novel, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, as a work of fiction that is “deeply rooted in years of research, historical fact and family lore.” This universal story of strong-willed survivors is illustrated with documents and evocative photographs.

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