Diane Ackerman

Diane Ackerman, author of A Natural History of the Senses, A Natural History of Love, and other volumes of nonfiction and poetry, is a rare combination of poet and scientist. Recipient of a number of awards, grants and honors, she has taught at a number of universities. Ackerman’s work appears regularly in The New Yorker, National Geographic and The New York Times.

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Jan Burke

Novelist Jan Burke took the mystery-loving world by storm with Goodnight Irene. The unsolicited manuscript won her a three-book contract with Simon and Schuster. Sweet Dream’s, Irene and Dear Irene are the second and third novels in Burke’s Irene series. It will be hard to beat the excitement of her first novel. President Bill Clinton held Goodnight Irene up on national TV when asked what he’d been reading lately.

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Jennifer Egan

Novelist Jennifer Egan has received prestigious prizes, literary awards and fellowships. Alice Adams says of Egan: “A highly original and unusually intelligent writer.” Her novel, The Invisible Circus, has been called an unforgettable first novel by a writer of uncommon ability. Robert Stone called it “dramatic, suspenseful and beautifully written.” Pat Conroy said that “Egan has written a splendid novel of depth and elegance.” Egan attended Cambridge University for two years on a Thouron Award and now lives in New York City.

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Shirlee Taylor Haizlip

Shirlee Taylor Haizlip presents an eloquent and sensitive family memoir in The Sweeter the Juice. Daughter of a black minister and a woman of mixed race, Haizlip chronicles the pain of searching for the relatives who abandoned her mother in childhood so they could “pass” for white. A gifted speaker, the author invites us to rethink the meaning of race. Featured on Oprah Winfrey, Haislip and her family attracted one of the five largest audiences in the show’s history.

Ursula Hegi

Ursula Hegi lived the first eighteen years of her life in Germany. She is the award-winning author of three novels, Intrusions, Floating in My Mother’s Palm, and Stones from the River, a major novel of Germany during the first half of the twentieth century. Her next novel, Salt Dancers, is scheduled for publication in 1995.

Linda Hogan

Linda Hogan’s The Book of Medicines, a work of poetry, “feels like a gift from the earth’s past to the present moment,” wrote Barbara Kingsolver, who described the Chicasaw poet’s first novel, Mean Spirit, a finalist for 1991 Pulitzer Prize, as “North American magic realism …a vast tragedy… carved to fit the human heart.” Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of a NEA grant, among numerous awards, Linda Hogan teaches at the University of Colorado.

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Elizabeth Kendall

Elizabeth Kendall, praised as “one of our most astute film and dance historians,” shares her social insights of the arts. Kendall is a teacher, journalist, scriptwriter, consultant, lecturer and author of the wonderfully entertaining Where She Danced, about the origins of modern dance in America, and The Runaway Bride: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1930’s, an intriguing analysis that vividly evokes the way Hollywood reflected and shaped the character of the American woman.

Jo-Ann Mapson

Jo-Ann Mapson is a novelist, poet, and a college teacher. Her second novel Blue Rodeo, a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selection, was deemed by Publisher’s Weekly “an engrossing, affection story,” and “wise in the ways of the human heart.” Mapson’s other works include Fault Line, a collection of short fiction; a novel Hank & Chloe; and Spooking the Horses, a book of poetry. She is working on Shadow Ranch, her third novel, due for publication in the fall of 1995.

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