Judith Freeman

Following the success of her short story collection, Family Attractions, Judith Freeman’s 1989 novel Chinchilla Farm was published to critical acclaim. In it, Freeman explores the western landscape, from Utah to Los Angeles to Baja, through the perceptive eyes and pungent voice of her gentle heroine Vera, who is force to reconstruct her own life. Her second novel, Set for Life, will be out next year.

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Jenny Joseph

Jenny Joseph lives in the Cotswalds in England. She is best known, locally, for her poem Warning, which begins, “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple….” She has authored several books of poetry, most recently The Inland Sea, (published by Papier-Mache Press in Watsonville, California), and six children’s books, as well as Persephone, her fiction in prose and verse, which won the James Tait Black award for fiction in 1986.

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Jill McCorkle

Jill McCorkle, critically acclaimed young novelist from North Carolina, creates with sharp wit and keen eye for detail the lively characters in her four novels of the contemporary South, The Cheer Leader, July 7, Tending To Virginia, and Ferris Beach. McCorkle is a natural Southern storyteller with a wise understanding of the human heart.

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Joanne Meschery

“Nothing short of extraordinary,” was Raymond Carver’s assessment of Joanne Meschery’s first novel, In a High Place. Her second novel, A Gentleman’s Guide to the Frontier, blends fact and legend for a re-telling that unsettles the settling of the Old West. With this fresh and memorable work, Meschery takes her place as a writer of classically American Fiction.

Marlane Meyer

From the luckless underclass come the characters for Marlane Meyer’s plays, Etta Jenks, Kingfish, and The Geography of Luck, which were produced by the Los Angeles Theatre Center when Meyer was the playwright in residence in 1988-1989. No stranger to adversity herself, she writes of those on the fringe whose struggles for survival bring them through sorrow and bitterness to some surprising conclusions.

Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee is both scholar (currently at Berkley) and writer. Her novels include The Tiger Daughter’s Wife, and Jasmine. She has written several short story collections, Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, in addition to two nonfiction works, Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy. Through her characters we learn not only about Indian women, and what immigrant women face, but about ourselves.

Barbara Quick

Of Barbara Quick’s first novel, Northern Edge, Ursula K. Lequin writes, “Literary Alaska has always been male territory. This vivid and engaging novel locates Alaska – at last –in women’s experience and what an experience!” The novel has been nominated for the National Book Award. Quick is one of 25 authors selected by B. Dalton book stores for their “Discover: Great New Writers” program. She is a poet and has reviewed extensively for the New York Times Book Review.

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Le Anne Schreiber

Le Anne Schreiber was the first female editor of the New York Times sports section before becoming deputy editor of the New York Times Book Review. Her memoir Midstream is a moving, beautifully observed journal about a mother’s death from cancer and a daughter’s renewal. It details both her new beginning and her mother’s demise with a sense of wonder, tenderness and occasional outrage.