LITERARY WOMEN
Celebrating Women Authors Since 1982
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Karen Kenyon
Breaking The Silence: Writing Your Autobiography
Karen Kenyon, author of Sunshower, teams up with Louise De Grave to discuss the writing of their own stories, encouraging others to do the same.
Bernice Kert
Bernice Kert’s fascinating book, The Hemingway Women, is about Ernest Hemingway’s relationships with his mother, his four wives, and other women important to his life. Ten years in the researching and writing, this is Mrs. Kert’s first published book, and the welcome given it by critics and public alike has enabled her to know the joys of “sweet success at sixty.”
From 1985 Festival ›
Denise Kiernan
In her most recent book, The Girls of Atomic City, Denise Kiernan traces the story of the women who worked on the Manhattan Project, who unknowingly helped to create fuel for the world’s first atomic bomb. A journalist, producer, and author, Denise’s work has appeared inThe New York Times as well as many other national publications.
Visit Denise Kiernan’s website › From 2014 Festival ›
Haven Kimmel
With wry humor, HAVEN KIMMEL vividly portrays the quirky world of adults in a best-selling childhood memoir, A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Moorland Indiana. Kimmel’s affection for her characters and remarkable wit also mark her celebrated debut novel, The Solace of Leaving Early, a love story sparked with theological and philosophical debate.
Visit Haven Kimmel’s website › From 2003 Festival ›
Laurie R. King
With Laurie R. King, readers get not one ingenious, articulate woman sleuth, but two: Oxford student Mary Russell, who finds herself leagued with a mostly retired Sherlock Holmes, and police detective Kate Martinelli, who solves homicides in present-day San Francisco. Winner of the Edgar, The Nero Wolfe, and Britain’s John Creasey Dagger awards, King challenges and delights in these two intricate, well crafted series.
Visit Laurie R. King’s website › From 1999 Festival ›
Lily King
Award-winning author Lily King’s recent bestseller, Euphoria, received both the Kirkus Prize and New England Award for Fiction. Many publications listed it as a Best Book of the Year, including the New York Times Book Review. King’s brilliant novel, inspired by an incident in Margaret Mead’s life, charts the path of three anthropologists isolated in remote New Guinea as their relationship unravels due to their rivaling scientific careers and the drum beat of sexual tension between them. This is King’s fourth award winning novel.
Visit Lily King’s website › From 2017 Festival ›
Barbara Kingsolver
Add Barbara Kingsolver’s distinctive voice to those who write vividly and authentically about women. Publisher’s Weekly hailed her first novel, The Bean Trees, as “an overwhelming delight, as random and unexpected as real life.” The New York Times Book Review found in the characters of Homeland, her collection of twelve short stories, “a moral toughness…that one sees in real people everywhere but rarely in recent American short stories.” Most recently, in her nonfiction book Holding the Line, she has turned her attention to the roles played by women in the copper mine strike of 1983.
Visit Barbara Kingsolver’s website › From 1990 Festival ›
Dr. Perri Klass
DR. PERRY KLASS is the award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, The Mystery of Breathing, Love and Modern Medicine and A Not Entirely Benign Procedure. She is also a pediatrician who is medical director of the national literary program Reach Out and Read dedicated to promoting literacy as part of pediatric primary care.
Visit Dr. Perri Klass’s website › From 2005 Festival ›
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Jean Hanff Korelitz is a prolific writer in several genres. Her essays have appeared in Vogue and Newsweek. One of her novels, Admission, was made into a popular movie, and she has authored novels for children as well as a book of poems. Her most recent novel, You Should Have Known, is an absorbing literary mystery. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge, she currently lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.
Visit Jean Hanff Korelitz’s website › From 2016 Festival ›Barbara Kroll
‘Twas A Dark And Stormy Night…
Barbara Kroll, humorist, teacher, essay contest enterer, researcher, and first-runner up in the Bulwer-Lytton contest for writing the “worst” opening sentence.
Carroll Lachnit
Carroll Lachnit informs the mystery with her print journalism experience. Murder in Brief introduces cop-turned-lawyer Hannah Barlow. In A Blessed Death, she probes related mysteries of faith, family, and a woman’s demise. Hannah studies independent adoption in Blood Ties soon.
From 1998 Festival ›
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 › From 1996 Festival ›
Dottie Lamm
Dottie Lamm wrote her delightful book Second Banana as a result of her experiences as the wife of Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado. She is also a television talk show host and a popular columnist for the Denver Post.
From 1986 Festival ›
Jill Marie Landis
Jill Marie Landis was a member of our Literary Women planning committee until she got so busy writing her first novel that we had to give her some time off. We are delighted that her talent and hard work won her the Golden Heart Award for her first historical romance, Sunflower, published by Berkley Books in 1988. Named “best new historical writer in 1987-88” by Romantic Times, Jill will have two books out in 1989 and yet more in 1990!
Visit Jill Marie Landis’s website › From 1989 Festival ›
Maya Lang
Written for “readers who never made it through Ulysses (or haven’t wanted to try),” The Sixteenth of June, Maya Lang’s debut novel, is a finely observed, wry social satire set in Philadelphia over the course of a single day, and a nod to James Joyce’s celebrated classic. Maya holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and was awarded the 2012 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholarship in Fiction.
Visit Maya Lang’s website › From 2016 Festival ›
Jane Langton
Jane Langton likes “to use something superb by somebody else as a sort of background” in her books: the writing of Emerson (The Transcendental Murder); Emily Dickinson (Emily Dickinson Is Dead); the Divine Comedy (The Dante Game); Handel’s Messiah (The Memorial Hall Murder); art masterpieces (Murder at the Gardner); and Thoreau territory (God in Concord) for her most recent mystery.
Visit Jane Langton’s website › From 1993 Festival ›
Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux pulls us “into the frightening brilliance of the world” in her two poetry collections, Awake and What We Carry. Her poetry transcends the ordinary facts of experience with elegance. It flies to the center of the nitty-gritty to emerge triumphant and sings about where we live.
Visit Dorianne Laux’s website › From 1997 Festival ›
Jill Leovy
After ten years embedded with the homicide detectives of the LAPD, Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy shines a new light on an old situation; the epidemic of black on black violence in South Central Los Angeles. Ghettoside is a thought provoking book that challenges assumptions about ‘gang-related’ violence. Winner of numerous awards, including the 2016 Ridenhour Book Prize which recognizes “acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society.”
From 2017 Festival ›
Diane Leslie
Diane Leslie is the author of Fleur De Leigh’s Life of Crime which, according to the New York Times, “offers a delicious and disturbing glimpse behind the high stucco walls of Hollywood, circa 1957.” She has a genuine gift for creating characters that live and breathe in the posh environs of her childhood. Great wit and insight in both her writing and conversation!
Visit Diane Leslie’s website › From 2000 Festival ›
Elinor Lipman
ELINOR LIPMAN writes romantic comedy for readers who want to be “amused, moved, befriended, included.” She can make us laugh out loud as she converts serious subject matters into humor with the skill of an alchemist. All six of her books are in print, and her seventh, The Pursuit of Alice Thrift,, is due in June.
Visit Elinor Lipman’s website › From 2003 Festival ›
Shelley List
Shelley List is the many-talented, multi-award-winning, socially-conscious television Head Writer/Producer of television series: Cagney and Lacey, And Baby Makes Six, Something So Right, and Between Friends. She is the author of three novels: Did You Love Daddy When I was Born, Nobody Makes Me Cry, and Forgiving. She has been a feature editor, theater reviewer and author of journalistic articles for leading magazines, as well as the New York and Los Angeles Times.
From 1989 Festival ›
Margot Livesey
MARGOT LIVESEY grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands, and is the author of a collection of stories and six novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture and most recently The House On Fortune Street. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA. She is currently a writer in residence at Emerson College in Boston.
Visit Margot Livesey’s website › From 2009 Festival ›
Myra Cohn Livingston
Myra Cohn Livingston, award-winning poet, anthologist, teacher and educator, is the author of over 45 books, including Worlds I Know and Other Poems, Celebrations, A Lollygag of Limericks and her most recent, Earth Songs, and Higgledy-Piggledy: Verses and Pictures.
Visit Myra Cohn Livingston’s website ›From 1987 Festival ›
Attica Locke
Written with power and grace, Bluebird, Bluebird is a heartbreaking thriller about racial tensions in a small East Texas town where conflicting emotions of love and justice intersect. Winner of the Edgar Award for best novel, it was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Attica Locke has authored several prize winners: Pleasantville, Harper Lee Prize; The Cutting Season, Ernest Gaines Award; and Black Water Rising, Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Purchase from Creating Conversations › Visit Attica Locke’s website › From 2019 Festival ›
Sandra Tsing Loh
Writer/performer Sandra Tsing Loh has been called a “master of the excruciating moment.” Her witty and trenchant observations of the So Cal scene can be found in her critically acclaimed one-person show, Aliens in America; the best-selling essay collection, Depth Takes a Holiday, and the hilarious novel of L.A., If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now. “The Loh Life,” her lively radio commentary, is heard weekly on KCRW.
From 2000 Festival ›