Mary Higgins Clark

Mary Higgins Clark has kept her readers avidly turning the pages through six best-selling suspense novels: Where Are the Children? (the film starred Jill Clayburgh), A Stranger Is Watching, The Cradle Will Fall, A Cry in the Night, Stillwatch, and last year, Weep No More, My Lady. A grandmother, she seems to know what most frightens women, taps into this anxiety and entertains them by letting them live their fears safely, through an escape into her books.

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.”

Susan Tyler Hitchcock

SUSAN TYLER HITCHOCK, author of the recently published Frankenstein: A Cultural History is a prolific non-fiction writer and editor. She has written professionally for more than 30 years, contributing to newspapers, magazines and essay anthologies as well as writing her own books, including Mad Mary Lamb: Lunacy and Murder in Literary London and Gather Ye Wild Things: A Forager’s Year.

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.

Nathalia Holt

Author Nathalia Holt’s recent book, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars, relates the illuminating story of the young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, and launched America into space. This work follows her previous book, Cured: The People Who Defeated HIV.

Both author and science journalist, her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Time, and Popular Science. She is a former fellow at the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard University. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Boston, MA.

Nancy Horan

NANCY HORAN’s bestselling debut novel, Loving Frank, delves into the life of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his relationship with Mamah Borthwick Cheney during the years 1907 to 1914. The novel is based on seven years of meticulous research. Horan beautifully blends fact and fiction garnering widespread praise from critics and readers.

Wendy Hornsby

Wendy Hornsby’s novel, No Harm, just published by Dodd, Mead & Co., Inc., was called a “tightly controlled first mystery” in August by Publisher’s Weekly. It deals with the chicanery and death over a piece of California waterfront property. Publishing has brought confidence to this writer and she has a second mystery ready. She lives in Long Beach with her husband and children.

Pam Houston

Pam Houston, in her newest book Waltzing the Cat, explores the life of Lucy, an award-winning landscape photographer. Author of the widely acclaimed short story collection, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Houston once again inspires and challenges her readers with an engaging, unconventional heroine, who takes physical and emotional risks.

Ladee Hubbard

In Ladee Hubbard’s imaginative and engrossing second novel, The Rib King, the reader is dropped into the circa 1914 daily whirl of Black servants in a fading, but well-to-do household. The escapades of these hardworking, innovative people create a suspenseful page turner as a network of interests compete to take advantage of them. This illuminating examination of a troubled period sheds light on those who thrive despite prevalent racism.

Susan Hubbel

Susan Hubbel’s A Country Year reflects her discoveries on a peninsula between the Ozark Mountains. Before becoming a commercial beekeeper, Hubbel managed a bookstore and was a librarian. A burgeoning cult has developed around her book, only published in 1986.

Josephine Humphreys

Josephine Humphreys lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Her lyrical and introspective novel Dreams of Sleep has received PEN’s 1985 Ernest Hemingway prize for a first novel.

Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven is the award-winning author of three novels. Her latest, Blame, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and deals with the issues of guilt, redemption, and the painful soul-searching that results from the aftermath of a deadly alcohol-fueled accident that caused a double homicide. She also wrote Jamesland and Roundrock.

Eowyn Ivey

Gifted storyteller Eowyn Ivey’s newest work, To the Bright Edge of the World, is a haunting historical novel about an 1885 wilderness expedition into Alaska’s Northern interior. It is a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, a Library Journal Top 10 Book of 2016, was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, and was awarded the 2017 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

Her debut novel, The Snow Child, was an international bestseller published in more than 25 languages and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Eowyn’s essays and short fiction have appeared in London’s Observer Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Alaska Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and the North Pacific Rim literary journal Cirque. She lives with her family in Alaska

Kay Redfield Jamison

KAY REDFIELD JAMISON is an internationally acclaimed professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In 1995 she published her groundbreaking and exquisitely wrought memoir, An Unquiet Mind which chronicles her struggle with bipolar disorder. Other bestselling works include, Night Falls Fast and Touched With Fire. Her latest book, Nothing Was the Same, has just been released.

J. A. Jance

J. A. JANCE is a New York Times bestselling author of over 50 books. Before becoming a published author, however, she was a school librarian, a teacher and an insurance sales woman. Jance creates characters you care about, from J.P. Beaumont, a Pacific Northwest homicide detective, to Joanna Brady, an Arizona sheriff. Her most recently released mystery is Cold Betrayal. Born in South Dakota, raised in Arizona, she now divides her time between Seattle and Tucson.

Diane Johnson

Diane Johnson blends accurate observation of contemporary life with satiric comments and unexpected humor in her powerful novels. Her current Persian Nights, set in Iran when the Shah’s power was crumbling, features an American wife and mother struggling to understand Iranian society and to fulfill herself as well. Other novels are Loving Hands at Home, Burning, and The Shadow Knows. Her biographies are: Lesser Lives and Dashiell Hammett: book reviews are collected in Terrorists and Novelists.

Joyce Johnson

Joyce Johnson is the author of the acclaimed memoir Minor Characters that chronicles her experiences with the Beat Generation writers, and the forthcoming Door Wide Open, a collection of letters written between Jack Kerouac and Johnson during their love affair in 1957 and 1958. An accomplished memoir and fiction writer Johnson’s work has appeared in New Yorker, Harpers, New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Tayari Jones

An American Marriage is the story of newlyweds - a young African-American golden couple poised for success – who are torn apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. It is at heart a love story that looks deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward with hope and conviction. Tayari Jones has authored three other novels, Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, and Silver Sparrow.

Hillary Jordan

HILLARY JORDAN is the author of Mudbound, a first novel that won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded to a debut novel that addresses issues of social justice. She has been featured in the Discover Great New Writers program at Barnes & Noble. Hilary grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

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.

Rachel Kadish

A sophisticated work of historical fiction, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two remarkable women separated by centuries, that centers on a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents. This literary intrigue, filled with memorable characters, is both electrifying and intimate in tone, and received the 2017 National Jewish Book Award. Rachel Kadish’s previous novels are, From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story.

Kristiana Kahakauwila

Kristiana Kahakauwila, a native Hawaiian,earned a BA from Princeton and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She wrote and edited forWine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado, and is now an assistant professor of creative writing at Western Washington University. Kristiana’s debut short story collection, This Is Paradise, captures the grit and glory of modern Hawaii.

Nora Okja Keller

In her exceptional first novel, Comfort Women, Nora Okja Keller fashions exquisite images to reveal the youthful Beccah’s painful need for a normal home life amidst the tormenting memories of her Korean mother Akiko. Sold at age twelve to service soldiers from the occupying army, Akiko hides her past from the daughter she fiercely loves, retreating into a recurring psychosis and the world of spirits.

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.

Susan Kenney

Susan Kenney’s novel, In Another Country, won the 1984 New Voice Literary Award and has been published in four languages. The Colby College, Maine, teacher of English has been published extensively for over a decade in a variety of genres. Her novels include Garden of Malice and Graves of Academe. Kenney’s slide presentation will relate the fact and fiction of place.