LITERARY WOMEN
Celebrating Women Authors Since 1982
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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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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.*
Visit Sonia Nazario’s website › From 2007 Festival ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›