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LITERARY WOMEN

Celebrating Women Authors Since 1982



The Bishop
Honor Moore, author of The Bishop

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.

Visit Honor Moore’s website › From 2009 Festival ›
Sweet Summer, by author Bebe Moore Campbell
Bebe Moore Campbell, author of Sweet Summer

Bebe Moore Campbell

Bebe Moore Campbell brings us a sensitive, lyrical account of growing up “with and without my father” in her autobiographical Sweet Summer, a winner of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Grant, the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Literature Award and the Midwestern Radio Theatre Workshop Competition. She is also the author of Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage.

From 1990 Festival ›
The Lost Mother, by author Mary McCarry Morris
Mary McCarry Morris, author of The Lost Mother

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.

Visit Mary McCarry Morris’s website › From 2006 Festival ›
White Dog Fell From The Sky, by author Eleanor Morse
Eleanor Morse, author of White Dog Fell From The Sky

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.

Visit Eleanor Morse’s website › From 2015 Festival ›
Jasmine, by author Bharati Mukherjee
Bharati Mukherjee, author of Jasmine

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.

From 1991 Festival ›
Where Echos Live, by author Marcia Muller
Marcia Muller, author of Where Echos Live

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.

Visit Marcia Muller’s website › From 1992 Festival ›
Locas, by author Yxta Maya Murray
Yxta Maya Murray, author of Locas

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.”

From 2000 Festival ›
Dear Digby, by author Carol Muske-Dukes
Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Dear Digby

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.

Visit Carol Muske-Dukes’s website › From 1993 Festival ›
How I Spent My Life's Vacation, by author Rita Nachtmann
Rita Nachtmann, author of How I Spent My Life's Vacation

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.

From 2000 Festival ›
Cry of the Peacock, by author Gina B. Nahai
Gina B. Nahai, author of Cry of the Peacock

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)

Visit Gina B. Nahai’s website › From 2004 Festival ›
Ahab's Wife, by author Sena Jeter Naslund
Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife

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.

Visit Sena Jeter Naslund’s website › From 2001 Festival ›
Women of Brewster Place, by author Gloria Naylor
Gloria Naylor, author of Women of Brewster Place

Gloria Naylor

1983 American Book Award Winner
Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place, an outstanding first novel “in seven stories.”

From 1984 Festival ›
Enrique's Journey, by author Sonia Nazario
Sonia Nazario, author of Enrique's Journey

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.*

Visit Sonia Nazario’s website › From 2007 Festival ›
The Situe Stories, by author Frances Khirallah Noble
Frances Khirallah Noble, author of The Situe Stories

Frances Khirallah Noble

Frances Khirallah Nobles’s short story collection The Situe Stories, appeared for five weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestsellers list. Noble is working on a novel and is completing a nonfiction work tentatively titled, Alley Flowers.

From 2002 Festival ›
Ways to Disappear, by author Idra Novey
Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear

Idra Novey

Prose that reads like poetry with the tempo of a fast paced thriller, this debut novel from Idra Novey was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was called a “tour de force” by Kirkus Review. Ways to Disappear is a meditation on how we choose to appear and disappear to each other. Both an accomplished poet and translator in Spanish and Portuguese, Novey has been published in eight languages.

Visit Idra Novey’s website › From 2017 Festival ›
The Last of Her Kind, by author Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind

Sigrid Nunez

SIGRID NUNEZ is the author of four novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God and For Rouenna. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize in Literature and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. Her latest novel, The Last of Her Kind, examines the intense and difficult friendship between two college roommates.

Visit Sigrid Nunez’s website › From 2008 Festival ›
I Am A Girl From Africa, by author Elizabeth Nyamayaro
Elizabeth Nyamayaro, author of I Am A Girl From Africa

Elizabeth Nyamayaro

Award winning humanitarian Elizabeth Nyamayaro’s memoir unfolds from a near-death experience and her silent vow to dedicate her life to helping others, to a courageous and determined quest to fulfill that vow. At the age of eight a severe draught struck Elizabeth’s village in Zimbabwe leaving her unable to move from hunger. A United Nations aid worker gave her a bowl of porridge that saved her life and inspired her dream.

Visit Elizabeth Nyamayaro’s website ›
From 2022 Festival ›
Almost There, by author Nuala O'Faolain
Nuala O'Faolain, author of Almost There

Nuala O'Faolain

NUALA O’FAOLAIN, born in County Dublin, reared by an alcoholic mother and a remote father, published as her first book a memoir, Are You Somebody? Next, a novel, My Dream of You, continued her examination of lives that are a constant struggle for emotional growth in the face of pain and midlife disappointment. Almost There, a recent memoir, continues that journey.

From 2004 Festival ›
Dept. Of Speculation, by author Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill, author of Dept. Of Speculation

Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Dept. of Speculation (2014) and Last Things (2000), which was chosen as Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times First Book Award. She is also the author of children’s books and has contributed to several anthologies. She teaches in the writing programs at Queens University, Brooklyn College and Columbia.

Visit Jenny Offill’s website › From 2015 Festival ›
Orhan's Inheritance, by author Aline Ohanesian
Aline Ohanesian, author of Orhan's Inheritance

Aline Ohanesian

In Orhan’s Inheritance, Aline Ohanesian’s debut novel, a family mystery unravels to expose roots in the Armenian genocide and diaspora. The novel has been recognized as a top book selection by Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and it was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ohanesian, a descendant of genocide survivors, lives in Orange County, California, with her husband and two young sons.

Visit Aline Ohanesian’s website › From 2016 Festival ›
Blood, Tin, Straw, by author Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds, author of Blood, Tin, Straw

Sharon Olds

What an honor to have with us the current New York State Poet Laureate, Sharon Olds! Often compared to both Plath and Sexton, Olds is the author of several acclaimed books of poetry, most recently, Blood, Tin, Straw. This widely anthologized winner of numerous awards and grants teaches graduate writers at NYU, and severely physically challenged writers at a state hospital.

Visit Sharon Olds’s website › From 2000 Festival ›
Tell Me a Riddle, by author Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen, author of Tell Me a Riddle

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen, whose profound writing has earned her national literary awards and lectureships at leading universities, is said to have contributed a new form to American fiction with her classic Tell Me a Riddle. Her non-fiction work, Silences, inspired by a life of work and poverty, confronts the crucial relationships between circumstances and creativity. Yonnondio: From the Thirties was begun during the Great Depression, but not published until 1974.

Visit Tillie Olsen’s website › From 1985 Festival ›
Rin Tin Tin, by author Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean, author of Rin Tin Tin

Susan Orlean

After graduating from the University of Michigan, Susan Orlean worked as a newspaper journalist. She became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1992. Her books range from the bestselling The Orchid Thief, used to great effect in the film “Adaptation,” to a book documenting the astonishing fame and fortune of a canine named Rin Tin Tin.

Visit Susan Orlean’s website › From 2014 Festival ›
When the Emperor Was Divine, by author Julie Otsuka
Julie Otsuka, author of When the Emperor Was Divine

Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, is about a group of young Japanese “picture brides” who sailed to America in the early 1900s. Winner of the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Awards, it was described by Booklist as “entrancing, appalling, and heartbreakingly beautiful.” A California native, Otsuka lives in New York City, and writes every afternoon in her neighborhood café.

Visit Julie Otsuka’s website › From 2013 Festival ›
How to Make an American Quilt, by author Whitney Otto
Whitney Otto, author of How to Make an American Quilt

Whitney Otto

Whitney Otto wrote her first novel, How to Make An American Quilt, in 1991. This highly original, intelligent and insightful work of fiction intersperses information about the history of quilting with the stories of a group of women living in a mythical town in California’s Central Valley. This patchwork approach affords the reader a rich experience in which the characters share their individuality as well as their complex relationships.

Visit Whitney Otto’s website › From 1993 Festival ›


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