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Author Chats
Has your reading group ever wished you could get an author’s take on some of your unanswered questions? Author Chat connects readers and writers and gives your book club the opportunity to talk to select Vintage and Anchor authors so you can pose those questions yourself.
Check out our list of authors below and select the author you’d like to speak with, then click on the button below to submit your request. We’ll contact you via email to schedule your chat.
PLEASE NOTE:
• We are unable to fulfill requests for one-on-one writing advice; Author Chats are intended to be conversations between authors and book clubs.
• Phone calls will be scheduled on a case-by-case basis at the convenience of the author.
• Limited to residents of the United States and Canada.
Note that at this time, Author Chats are not available.
| Brittany Ackerman author of The Brittanys
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Molly Aitken author of The Island Child
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Brittany Ackerman’s debut essay collection, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was the winner of Red Hen Press’s Nonfiction Award. The Brittanys is her first novel. (Author Photo © Carl Bird McLaughlin)
Molly Aitken was born in Scotland in 1991 and brought up in Ireland. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University where she was awarded the Janklow and Nesbit Prize for her novel. (Author Photo © Christy Ku)
| Clare Beams author of The Illness Lesson
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Aimee Bender author of The Butterfly Lampshade
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Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. (Author Photo © Kristi Jan Hoover)
Aimee Bender is the author of the novels The Color Master, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake—a New York Times bestseller, An Invisible Sign of My Own, and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. (Author Photo © Mark Miller)
| Emily Beyda author of The Body Double
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Raphael Bob-Waksberg author of Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory
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Emily Beyda is a Los Angeles native who for the past three years has written the popular “Dear Glutton” advice column in The Austin Chronicle. A graduate of Texas State’s M.F.A. program, she currently resides back in L.A. 
Raphael Bob-Waksberg is the creator and executive producer of the Netflix series BoJack Horseman. This is his first book. (Author Photo © Julie Lake)
| Chris Bohjalian author of Hour of the Witch
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Chris Cander author of The Weight of a Piano
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Chris Cander graduated from the Honors College at the University of Houston, in the city where she was raised and still lives, with her husband, daughter, and son. For seven years she has been a writer-in-residence for Writers in the Schools there. She serves on the Inprint advisory board and stewards several Little Free Libraries in her community. (Author Photo © Lauren Volness 2018)
| Jana Casale author of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky
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Jai Chakrabarti author of A Play for the End of the World
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Jana Casale has a BFA in fiction from Emerson College and an MSt in creative writing from Oxford. Originally from Lexington, Massachusetts, she currently resides in San Francisco with her husband. 
Jai Chakrabarti’s short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Chakrabarti was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. (Author Photo © Peter Dressel)
| Jonathan Coe author of Middle England
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Elisabeth Cohen author of The Glitch
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Jonathan Coe’s awards include the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and, for 
Elisabeth Cohen majored in comparative literature at Princeton University and her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, McSweeney’s Online and The Millions. She has an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and an MLS from the University of Maryland. (Author Photo © James Browning)
| Susan Conley author of Landslide
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Wade Davis author of Magdalena
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Susan Conley grew up in Maine. She is the author of four previous books including Elsey Come Home. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares. (Author Photo © Winky Lewis)
Wade Davis is the author of twenty books, including One River, The Wayfinders, and Into the Silence, which won the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize, the top award for literary nonfiction in the English language. (Author Photo © Adam Dillon)
| Marcy Dermansky author of Very Nice
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Maggie Doherty author of The Equivalents
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Marcy Dermansky is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. Her short fiction has been widely published and anthologized, appearing in McSweeney’s, Guernica, the Indiana Review, and Lenny Letter. Her essay “Maybe I Loved You” appeared in the best-selling anthology Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
Maggie Doherty teaches writing at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among other publications. She lives in Cambridge. (Author Photo © Max Larkin)
| Helen Ellis author of Southern Lady Code
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Julia Flynn Siler author of The White Devil’s Daughters
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Helen Ellis is the acclaimed author of Eating the Cheshire Cat. She is a poker player who competes on the national tournament circuit. Raised in Alabama, she lives with her husband in New York City. (Author Photo © Lara Magzan Photography)
Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her first book,
| Lauren Fox author of Send for Me
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Amity Gaige author of Sea Wife
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Lauren Fox who earned her M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota, is the author of the novels Days of Awe, Still Life with Husband, and Friends Like Us. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Marie Claire, Parenting, Psychology Today, The Rumpus, and Salon. (Author Photo © Amanda Schlicher)
Amity Gaige is the author of three novels, O My Darling,
| Peter Geye author of Northernmost
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John Freeman Gill author of The Gargoyle Hunters
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Born and raised in Minneapolis, Peter Geye lives there with his family. His previous novels are Safe from the Sea, The Lighthouse Road, and Wintering. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
John Freeman Gill is a native New Yorker and longtime New York Times contributor whose work has been anthologized in The New York Times Book of New York and More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. (Author Photo © Derek Shapton)
| Shaun Hamill author of A Cosmology of Monsters
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Rebecca Harrington author of Sociable
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A native of Arlington, Texas, Shaun Hamill holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in the dark woods of Alabama with his wife, his in-laws, and his dog. 
Rebecca Harrington is the author of the novel
| Wil Haygood author of In Black and White
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Katherine Heiny author of Standard Deviation
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Wil Haygood is currently visiting distinguished professor in the department of media, journalism, and film at Miami University, Ohio. For nearly three decades he was a journalist, serving as a national and foreign correspondent at The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and then at The Washington Post. (Author Photo © Jeff Sabo)
Katherine Heiny’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative, Glimmer Train, and many other places. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and children. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
| Cristina Henriquez author of The Book of Unknown Americans
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Daniel Hornsby author of Via Negativa
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Cristina Henríquez is the author of the story collection Come Together, Fall Apart, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and the novel The World in Half. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The American Scholar, Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, AGNI, and Oxford American, as well as in various anthologies. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
Daniel Hornsby was born in Muncie, Indiana. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he received Hopwood Awards for both short fiction and the novel, and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School. (Author Photo © Alice Brown)
| Lisa Howorth author of Summerlings
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Gish Jen author of The Resisters
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Lisa Howorth was born in Washington, D.C., where her family has lived for four generations. She is a former librarian and the author of the novel Flying Shoes. She has written on art, travel, dogs, and music for the Oxford American and Garden & Gun, among other publications. (Author Photo © Maude Schuyler Clay)
Gish Jen is the author of four previous novels, a story collection, and two works of nonfiction, the latest of which was
| Bess Kalb author of Nobody Will Tell You This But Me
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Amanda Lee Koe author of Delayed Rays of a Star
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Bess Kalb is an Emmy-nominated writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Her writing for the show earned her a Writer’s Guild Award in 2016. She has also written for the Oscars and the Emmys. A regular contributor to The New Yorker‘s “Daily Shouts,” her work has been published in The New Republic, Grantland, Salon.com, Wired, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. (Author Photo © Lucas Foglia Photography)
Amanda Lee Koe was the fiction editor of Esquire Singapore, an honorary fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize for the story collection Ministry of Moral Panic. Her working manuscript for
| Ariel Lawhon author of Code Name Hélène
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Claire Lombardo author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
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Ariel Lawhon is the author of 
Claire Lombardo earned her MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Prior to writing
| Megha Majumdar author of A Burning
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Lucas Mann author of Captive Audience
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Megha Majumdar was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She moved to the United States to attend college at Harvard University, where she was a Traub Scholar, followed by graduate school in social anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She works as an associate editor at Catapult, and lives in New York City. 
Lucas Mann was born in New York City and received his MFA from the University of Iowa, where he was the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. His essays and stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from Wigleaf, Barrelhouse, New South, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and The Kenyon Review. (Author Photo © Piquant Photo)
| Tiffany McDaniel author of Betty
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Kamin Mohammadi author of Bella Figura
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Tiffany McDaniel is a novelist, poet, and visual artist born and raised in Ohio. She is the author of The Summer That Melted Everything. (Author Photo © Jennifer McDaniel)
Kamin Mohammadi was born in Iran in 1969 and exiled to the UK in 1979. She is an experienced journalist, travel writer, and broadcaster who has written for the British and international press including The Times (London), Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, and The Guardian. (Author Photo © Bernardo Conti)
| Violet Moller author of The Map of Knowledge
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Meg Mitchell Moore author of The Captain’s Daughter
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Violet Moller is a historian and writer based near Oxford, England. She received a PhD in intellectual history from Edinburgh University, where she wrote her dissertation on the library of a sixteenth century scholar. She has written three pop reference books for the publishing arm of the Bodleian Library. 
Meg Mitchell Moore is the author of the novels
| Mary Morris author of All the Way to the Tigers
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Alix Nathan author of The Warlow Experiment
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Mary Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels The Jazz Palace, A Mother’s Love, and House Arrest, and of nonfiction, including the travel memoir classic Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone. (Author Photo © Zoé Fisher)
Alix Nathan read English and music at York University. She lives in the Welsh Marches, where she owns some ancient woodlands with her husband. She is the author of His Last Fire (2014), a story collection, and The Flight of Sarah Battle (2015), a novel. (Author Photo © Jan Klos)
| Rhiannon Navin author of Only Child
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Alix Ohlin author of Dual Citizens
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Rhiannon Navin grew up in Bremen, Germany, in a family of book-crazy women. Her career in advertising brought her to New York City, where she worked for several large agencies before becoming a full-time mother and writer. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
Alix Ohlin is the author of four books, most recently the novel Inside, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. (Author Photo © Emily Cooper)
| Kimberly King Parsons author of Black Light
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Julia Phillips author of Disappearing Earth
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Born in Lubbock, Texas, Kimberly King Parsons received her MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Ninth Letter, and The Kenyon Review, among others. (Author Photo © Heather Hawksford)
Julia Phillips is a Fulbright Fellow whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Moscow Times, and The Paris Review. She lives in Brooklyn. (Author Photo © Nina Subin)
| Massimo Pigliucci author of How to Live a Good Life
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Lara Prescott author of The Secrets We Kept
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Socrates famously said “the unexamined life is not worth living,” but what does it mean to truly live philosophically? This thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection brings together essays by fifteen leading philosophers reflecting on what it means to live according to a philosophy of life.
Lara Prescott received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. She was previously an animal protection advocate and a political campaign operative. Her stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, Crazyhorse, Day One,and Tin House Flash Fridays. (Author Photo © Trevor Paulhus)
| Joanna Rakoff author of My Salinger Year
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Sarah Ramey author of The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness
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Joanna Rakoff’s novel A Fortunate Age won the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers and the Elle Readers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle best seller. She has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, and other publications. (Author Photo © David Ignaszewski)
Sarah Ramey is a writer and musician (known as Wolf Larsen) living in Washington, DC. She graduated from Bowdoin College in 2003, received an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia in 2007, and worked on President Obama’s 2008 campaign. (Author Photo © Julius Schlosburg)
| Maria Reva author of Good Citizens Need Not Fear
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Will Schwalbe author of Books for Living
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Maria Reva was born in Ukraine and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has an MFA in fiction from the Michener Center at the University of Texas. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories (2017 and 2019), McSweeny’s and Granta. She currently lives in Austin, Texas, and also works as an opera librettist. (Author Photo © Matthew Prescott)
Will Schwalbe has worked in publishing; digital media, as the founder and CEO of Cookstr.com; and as a journalist, writing for various publications, including The New York Times and the South China Morning Post. He is on the board of the Kingsborough Community College Foundation. (Author Photo © Josef Astor)
| Casey Schwartz author of Attention: A Love Story
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Stephanie Scott author of What’s Left of Me Is Yours
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Casey Schwartz is the author of 
Stephanie Scott is a Singaporean and British writer who was born and raised in South East Asia. She read English Literature at York and Cambridge and holds an M.St in Creative Writing from Oxford. Scott was awarded a BAJS Toshiba Studentship for her anthropological work on her novel What’s Left of Me Is Yours and has been made a member of the British Japanese Law Association as a result of her research. (Author Photo © Julius Honnor)
| Maggie Shipstead author of Astonish Me
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Kory Stamper author of Word by Word
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Maggie Shipstead is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first novel, 
Kory Stamper is a lexicographer who spent almost two decades writing dictionaries at Merriam-Webster. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and The Washington Post. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
| Melanie Sumner author of How to Write a Novel
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Rufi Thorpe author of The Knockout Queen
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Melanie Sumner, a recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, is the author of The Ghost of Milagro Creek, The School of Beauty and Charm, and Polite Society. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and Seventeen. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
Rufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. Her first novel,
| Rebecca Watson author of little scratch
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Rebecca Watson writes for publications including the Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and Granta. In 2018 she was short-listed for the White Review Short Story Prize. This is her debut novel. (Author Photo © Nina Subin)