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.

Honor Moore

HONOR MOORE has received many awards for her poetry and her playwriting. Her memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, is a beautiful portrait of her illustrious father, an Episcopal priest, who became an activist bishop in Washington, D.C. and New York. It engages the reader in the great issues of American life: war, race, family sexuality and faith.

Mary McCarry Morris

MARY MCCARRY MORRIS has been recognized as one of the most superb storytellers of our time and has been compared to John Steinbeck and Carson McCullers. Her first novel, Vanished, was nominated for both PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award. Songs in Ordinary Time was an Oprah Book Club pick and critics cited her latest, The Lost Mother, as Morris’ strongest novel to date.

Eleanor Morse

Eleanor Morse’s novel, White Dog Fell from the Sky, drawn from her time in Botswana in the 1970’s, is a compelling story of friendship between two displaced characters: Isaac, a South African fleeing apartheid, and Alice, an American expatriate. Morse lives in Maine and won several regional book awards for her earlier novel, An Unexpected Forest.

Bharati Mukherjee

Bharati Mukherjee is both scholar (currently at Berkley) and writer. Her novels include The Tiger Daughter’s Wife, and Jasmine. She has written several short story collections, Darkness and The Middleman and Other Stories which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, in addition to two nonfiction works, Days and Nights in Calcutta and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy. Through her characters we learn not only about Indian women, and what immigrant women face, but about ourselves.

Marcia Muller

Marcia Muller, a former English literature and journalism major, created the role model for all contemporary women p.i.’s in Sharon McCone, heroine of eleven mysteries. Besides its stay-up-till-its-over plot, her latest, Where Echoes Live, is enriched by the idea that courage to change one’s life does not belong solely to youth and by its setting in fictionalized Mono Lake and Bodie, California.

Yxta Maya Murray

A graduate of L.B. Millikan High School, and now a professor at Loyola Law School, Yxta Maya Murray is the author of two novels set in today’s East Los Angeles: Locas, and What It Takes To Get To Vegas. According to the Chicago Tribune, Murray is a writer “with an insiders’s eye, eloquently capturing the struggles of being poor and Mexican-American in LA.”

Carol Muske-Dukes

Carol Muske Dukes is the recipient of numerous awards for her poetry, including the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a National Education Association award, and an Ingram Merrill Fellowship. Dear Digby, her hilarious yet poignant first novel, is scheduled to be made into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer, and she recently published a second novel called Saving St. Germ. Muske-Dukes teaches at the University of Southern California.

CSULB Mystery-Cult

Whodunits? The women do it well!

Afternoon Session
Eileen Lothamer, PhD, in Victorian Literature along with co-conspirator Louise Lubbe, Professor of English, emeritus, discuss the women writers of the genre.

Rita Nachtmann

Rita Nachtmann grew up in Illinois, graduated from NYU, acted and wrote in Chicago and New York City, and now lives in California, teaching dramatic writing at UCLA. Her eight plays include, How I Spent My Life’s Vacation (Pen West Award), Mama Drama and A Shiksa in Boca Raton, plus numerous one-acts and screenplays. Nachtmann adroitly pokes fun at the pretentious, and investigates life’s daily drama.

Gina B. Nahai

GINA B. NAHAI has written three novels including Cry of the Peacock, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, which was number one on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Her most recent work, Sunday’s Silence, sets its story in Appalachia and “expands Nahai’s fictional universe in new and curiously fitting directions.” (Publishers Weekly)

Sena Jeter Naslund

Inspired by a brief passage in Moby Dick, Sena Jeter Naslund created Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star Gazer, This uplifting story of one women’s spiritual journey was selected as on of the top five novels of 1999 by Time magazine. Naslund is also the author of the novel, Sherlock in Love, and the short story collection, The Disobedience of Water.

Gloria Naylor

1983 American Book Award Winner

Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place, an outstanding first novel “in seven stories.”

Sonia Nazario

SONIA NAZARIO won the Pulitzer Prize for her Los Angeles Times story of a boy’s dangerous journey to join his mother in the United States. Expanded with new research, Enrique’s Journey “is a timely and riveting narrative of the dangerous journey undertaken to make a broken family whole.*

Nana Nkweti

This impressive debut collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells, offers ten original stories that are heartbreaking, satirical, and laugh-out-loud funny. Nana Nkweti writes stories across a variety of genres on very different subjects. From a Comic Con Convention in New York to a difficult birthing in a Cameroonian village, these stories are filled with unforgettable characters etched in impeccable prose.