Maria Amparo Escandon

MARIA AMPARO ESCANDON, best-selling bilingual storyteller, was named Writer to Watch by Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. In her second novel, Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co., the incarcerated narrator “reads” to her fellow inmates at the weekly Library Club. As she pretends to recite from the classics, she tells a humorous and passionate mystery that explores the love and hurt of a father and daughter on the run.

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Elizabeth Gaffney

In her first novel, Metropolis, ELIZABETH GAFFNEY, advisory editor of The Paris Review, has placed vividly imagined characters in the brawling, rapidly changing New York City of the post-Civil War era. The Dickensian novel captures the violence and splendor of the emerging modern city, as well as the “luck and misfortune” of its immigrant hero. Gaffney’s short stories have appeared in publications such as North American Review, Mississippi Review and The Reading Room.

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Laura Hillman

LAURA HILLMAN’s I Will Plant You A Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler’s List Survivor is an account of her harrowing odyssey through eight concentration camps during World War II. Told in plain, clear prose, it is a story of astonishing power and of “keeping courage and hope and love alive in the harshest of times.”

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Alison McGhee

ALISON MCGHEE writes novels about love and loss, connection and disintegration, friendship and alienation and these stories are told in such a distinctive voice that the reader becomes submerged in the characters’ lives. She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Shadow Baby. Her other works include Was It Beautiful?, Rainlight and All Rivers Flow to the Sea, as well as award-winning books for children.

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Mary McCarry Morris

MARY MCCARRY MORRIS has been recognized as one of the most superb storytellers of our time and has been compared to John Steinbeck and Carson McCullers. Her first novel, Vanished, was nominated for both PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award. Songs in Ordinary Time was an Oprah Book Club pick and critics cited her latest, The Lost Mother, as Morris’ strongest novel to date.

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Mary Doria Russell

Before becoming an award-winning novelist, MARY DORIA RUSSELL was a paleoanthropologist with specialties in bone biology and biomechanics. Her first two novels, The Sparrow and its sequel Children of God, explored God’s role in our universe. Her new novel, A Thread of Grace, is a rich, complex account of Jewish refugees in Italy during World War II and the ordinary Italians who risked everything to save them.

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