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.

Nancy Mairs

Nancy Mairs, author of Plaintext, a collection of essays, was born in Long Beach. She now lives in Tucson with her husband and children. A graduate of Wheaton College, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. She writes of triumph and despair, not only as a victim of crippling illness, but as a vibrant human being.

Megha Majumdar

In her incendiary debut novel, A Burning, Megha Majumdar writes a gripping thriller with the force of an epic…“taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting.” Presenting its contemporary Indian characters with prismatic portraiture, it demonstrates the consequences of limited choices, hopes and dreams available to people living on the margins. This is a novel of our pandemic times, an exploration of precarity in all its forms, as funny as it is sad.

Cynthia Whitcomb Mandelberg

“Grand Slam”: Writing for Television, Film and Stage
Cynthia Whitcomb Mandelberg, Long Beach writer of outstanding television biographies, including Eleanor, First Lady of the World starring Jean Stapleton in May of 1982, and The Grace Kelly Story being produced in association with Cheryl Ladd. Also, Looking Glass a play based on the life of Lewis Carroll.

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.

Margaret Maron

MARGARET MARON writes the Judge Deborah Knott mystery series, situated in her native North Carolina, as well as the Detective Sigrid Harald of NYPD series, short stories and non-mystery novels. Publishers Weekly calls Maron “one of the most seamless Southern writers since Margaret Mitchell.” Long Beach Public Library lists twenty-two of her titles.

Becky Masterman

Becky Masterman’s debut thriller, Rage Against the Dying, captured worldwide attention with her smart and compassionate heroine, Brigid Quinn. Aging, but no MissMarple, this woman can still take down a mugger. The story is fast-paced fun throughout; a book you won’t want to put down.

Frances Mayes

Frances Mayes, widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer, takes the reader into the heart of Italy through her sensuous memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun. Her poetic descriptions bring alive the adventures of purchasing, restoring, and living in an abandoned villa in this spectacular countryside.

Tilar J. Mazzeo

In her compelling World War II story, Irena’s Children, Tilar J. Mazzeo captures the extraordinary courage of Irena Sendler; a Polish social worker who was granted full access to the Warsaw ghetto. Her compassion for the plight of trapped Jewish families led Irena to create a network of individuals who took enormous personal risks to smuggle over 2500 Jewish children past the Nazis.

Mazzeo is the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English at Colby College and the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times bestselling author of numerous works of narrative nonfiction. She divides her time among coastal Maine, New York City, and Saanichton, British Columbia, where she lives with her husband at Parsell Vineyard.

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.

Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of the ALA Notable Story Collection Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry? Her eccentric debut novel, The Giant’s House, a tender story of a friendship between a lonely librarian and an eleven-year-old boy, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. In 1996 Granto magazine named McCracken one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists.

Sharyn McCrumb

SHARYN McCRUMB’s eighteen novels and two short-story collections celebrate Appalachian history and folklore with such skill that they are studied in universities worldwide. Winner of six Notable Book Awards from The New York Times, she weaves a tale! The Songcatcher follows her own family history, beginning with a young boy kidnapped off the coast of Scotland in 1751.

Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott is a two-published-novels young writer, whose latest, That Night, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times 1987 Fiction Prize. Her vision of a pair of1960’s teenage lovers seems to say we can only defeat death with love. Only 28 when her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter, was published, Alice credits the writing program at the University of New Hampshire as important to her development.

Cyra McFadden

Cyra McFadden wrote her rolicking best-selling biography, Rain or Shine, about her father and mother; he, the Cy Taillon of rodeo announcing (who made up her name from his) and she, the Patricia Montgomery of vaudeville and the St. Louis Municipal Opera. Her previous book, The Serial, a social satire of life in Marin County, was published in 1977. She also writes a bi-weekly column for the San Francisco Examiner.

Alison McGhee

ALISON MCGHEE writes novels about love and loss, connection and disintegration, friendship and alienation and these stories are told in such a distinctive voice that the reader becomes submerged in the characters’ lives. She is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Shadow Baby. Her other works include Was It Beautiful?, Rainlight and All Rivers Flow to the Sea, as well as award-winning books for children.

Terry McMillan

Mama!….hilarious, horrifying and moving, in turn, is the first novel of Terry McMillan. She zeroes in on the poverty, economic, cultural and spiritual, which stamp the lives of her unforgettable characters. McMillan was featured in Esquire Magazine, July 1988 Literature Issue, alongside Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Joseph Heller. Her new novel, Men With Good Hands, was excerpted in that same issue.

Maile Meloy

MAILE MELOY’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best New American Voices. The New York Times Book Review describes her collection of short stories, Half in Love, as “lean, and controlled in their narration and abundant and moving in their effects.” She captures vibrant moments in life as her characters experience desire, fear and mystery. Her debut novel, Liars and Saints is a multigenerational saga of the Catholic Santerre family.

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.

Diane Wood Middlebrook

Diane Wood Middlebrook, poet, literary critic and professor of English at Stanford University, chronicles with sensitivity and compassion the metamorphosis of a poorly educated “mad housewife” into a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet in her resently released book, Anne Sexton: A Biography. Among Middlebrook’s other publications are Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, edited with Diana George, and a collection of her own poetry, Gin Considered as a Demon.

Candice Millard

CANDICE MILLARD has moved from being editor at National Geographic to becoming author of The River of Doubt, an engrossing account of the psyches of two men, Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit, as they complete their death-defying journey through uncharted tributaries of the Amazon River. Millard reveals both history and character with clarity and authority.

Madeline Miller

A story of love and adventure that vividly conjures the world of ancient Greek myths, Madeline Miller’s debut novel, The Song of Achilles, won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller. When she’s not writing, Madeline teaches Latin, Greek, and Shakespeare in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Anchee Min

Anchee Min has of late become the darling of the media, a dramatic change for this former Maoist Red Guard teenager, and later, performer in the role of Madame Mao in Chinese film. From the experience she wrote Becoming Madame Mao, her latest novel, a powerful tale of passion, betrayal, and survival. Other books by Min include the memoir Red Azalea and the novel The Lost Daughters of China.

Susan Minot

Susan Minot is the author of the novels Monkeys, Follys, and her latest, the highly acclaimed, Evening, an exquisite story of memory and desire. Minot’s other works include the short story collection, Lust and Other Stories, and the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s, Stealing Beauty. She has been included in the O. Henry Awards Pushcart Prizes, and the Best American Stories.

Jacquelyn Mitchard

Jacquelyn Mitchard, magazine and newspaper journalist, has written a moving first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean. Braided into her suspenseful plot about a missing child are psychological truths about motherhood, family relationships, and the sustaining importance of friendship. This book was chosen as the first to be featured in Oprah Winfrey’s national reading group.