Giaconda Belli

Giaconda Belli’s novel, The Inhabited Woman, a political adventure romance, draws from her background as part of the Managuan upper crust and subsequent life as a Sandanista revolutionary. She and another became the last survivors of her cell. Her poetry, which celebrates equality, both political and sexual, has won the prestigious Casa de las Americas prize. Harlold Pinter describes her as “one of the most gifted writers to come out of Central America in the last ten years.”

Kirsten Lagatree

Kirsten Lagatree explains that her book, Feng Shui: Arranging Your Home to Change Your Life, holds ancient Asian wisdom “for the rest of us.” This simple and highly readable work describes the what, why and how of feng shui, also known as the Chinese art of placement. It gives a room-by-room guide to transforming your home and office in ways that can bring about positive changes in your life.

Visit Kirsten Lagatree’s website ›

M.G. Lord

M.G. Lord’s Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, is no ordinary biography. She uses her talents as an editorial cartoonist and investigative journalist to explore the social influence of Barbie. It will change forever how readers look at the doll and themselves.

Visit M.G. Lord’s website ›

Abigail Padgett

Abigail Padgett’s Child of Silence, is the first of her Bo Bradley mysteries. It’s sequel, Strawgirl, won her an appreciative audience and glowing critical acclaim: The New York Times recommended it to President Clinton. Turtle Baby, the third in the series, was released in March 1995, and the fourth, Moonbird Boy, will be in bookstores April 1996.

Susan Power

Susan Power’s first novel, The Grass Dancer, is the winner of the 1995 PEN/Hemingway award. Ther short fiction has appeared in such journals and anthologies as the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Story, and The Best American Short Stories of 1993. Alice Hoffman says of Power’s novel: “So stunning, so extraordinary in its depth and passion you will swear there’s a miracle on every page.” Her new work, War Bundles, centers on Chicago’s 25,000 member Native American community,

Dori Sanders

Dori Sanders’s first novel Clover, was compared to the fiction of Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Zora Neale Hurston. Her Own Place delighted “with comedy and pathos of everyday life lived by everyday people - black and white.”

Visit Dori Sanders’s website ›

Linda Gray Sexton

Linda Gray Sexton spares nothing and no one in her courageous memoir, Searching for Mercy Street. Her mother, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton, committed suicide when Sexton was a twenty-one year old Harvard student. Her book reveals the pain, explores the gifts, and accepts the love in their tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. Sexton has written several novels, one of which, Points of Light, was adapted for the 1994 television movie Reunion,

Visit Linda Gray Sexton’s website ›

Belle Yang

Belle Yang’s first book, Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders, is an enchanting and beautiful work. Her vibrant illustrations brighten the stories inspired by her father’s boyhood memories of growing up in Manchuria. At first the characters of these stories became the subjects of her art, but Yang felt she needed to do more than paint to express their voices. So the painter became a storyteller and the paintings and the stories flow together to create this extraordinary book.

Visit Belle Yang’s website ›

Ann Haymond Zwinger

Ann Haymond Zwinger published the two latest of her sixteen books, Downcanyon (Western Arts Federation Award) and Wilderness Women (co-edited with her daughter Susan) in 1995. Genesis: the Yosemite Valley will come out later this year. This naturalist, with a B.A. from Wellesley and M.A. in Art History from Indiana University, taught at Smith before marrying and raising three daughters. During her thirties she returned to writing and illustrating nature books.