Reading Group Center




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

author chatBrittany 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)
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Molly Aitken
author of The Island Child

author chatMolly 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)
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Clare Beams
author of The Illness Lesson

author chat 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)
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Aimee Bender
author of The Butterfly Lampshade

author chatAimee 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)
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Emily Beyda
author of The Body Double

author chat 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. The Body Double is her first novel. (Author Photo © Lauren Beyda)
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Raphael Bob-Waksberg
author of Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory

author chatRaphael Bob-Waksberg is the creator and executive producer of the Netflix series BoJack Horseman. This is his first book. (Author Photo © Julie Lake)
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Chris Bohjalian
author of Hour of the Witch

author chatChris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of twenty-two books, including The Red Lotus, Midwives, and The Flight Attendant, which is an HBO Max limited series starring Kaley Cuoco. His other books include The Guest Room; Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast; and The Double Bind. (Author Photo © Victoria Blewer)
››REQUEST A CHAT AT CHRISBOHJALIAN.COM

Chris Cander
author of The Weight of a Piano

author chatChris 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)
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Jana Casale
author of The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky

author chatJana 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. The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is her first novel. (Author Photo © Elena Seibert)
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Jai Chakrabarti
author of A Play for the End of the World

author chatJai 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)
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Jonathan Coe
author of Middle England

author chatJonathan Coe’s awards include the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix Médicis Étranger, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and, for Middle England, the Costa Novel Award and the Prix du Livre Européen. He lives in London. (Author Photo © Caroline Irby)
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Elisabeth Cohen
author of The Glitch

author chatElisabeth 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)
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Susan Conley
author of Landslide

author chatSusan 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)
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Wade Davis
author of Magdalena

author chatWade 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)
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Marcy Dermansky
author of Very Nice

author chatMarcy 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)
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Maggie Doherty
author of The Equivalents

author chatMaggie 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)
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Helen Ellis
author of Southern Lady Code

author chatHelen 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)
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Julia Flynn Siler
author of The White Devil’s Daughters

author chatJulia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her first book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, was a finalist for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting. (Author Photo © Abigayle Tarsches)
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Lauren Fox
author of Send for Me

author chatLauren 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)
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Amity Gaige
author of Sea Wife

author chatAmity Gaige is the author of three novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, and Schroder, which was short-listed for the Folio Prize in 2014. Published in eighteen countries, Schroder was named one of best books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Kirkus Reviews, among others. (Author Photo © Sarma Ozols)
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Peter Geye
author of Northernmost

author chatBorn 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)
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John Freeman Gill
author of The Gargoyle Hunters

author chatJohn 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)
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Shaun Hamill
author of A Cosmology of Monsters

author chatA 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. A Cosmology of Monsters is his first novel. (Author Photo © Derek Shapton)
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Rebecca Harrington
author of Sociable

author chatRebecca Harrington is the author of the novel Penelope and the comic essay collection I’ll Have What She’s Having. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The New York Times, Elle, NPR.com, and other publications. She lives in New York City. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
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Wil Haygood
author of In Black and White

author chatWil 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)
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Katherine Heiny
author of Standard Deviation

author chatKatherine 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)
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Cristina Henriquez
author of The Book of Unknown Americans

author chatCristina 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)
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Daniel Hornsby
author of Via Negativa

author chatDaniel 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)
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Lisa Howorth
author of Summerlings

author chatLisa 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)
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Gish Jen
author of The Resisters

author chatGish Jen is the author of four previous novels, a story collection, and two works of nonfiction, the latest of which was The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She teaches from time to time in China, and otherwise lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Author Photo © Basso Cannarsa)
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Bess Kalb
author of Nobody Will Tell You This But Me

author chatBess 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)
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Amanda Lee Koe
author of Delayed Rays of a Star

author chatAmanda 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 Delayed Rays of a Star won the Henfield Prize, awarded to the best work of fiction by a graduating MFA candidate at Columbia University. (Author Photo © Kirsten Tan)
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Ariel Lawhon
author of Code Name Hélène

author chatAriel Lawhon is the author of I Was Anastasia and cofounder of the popular Web site SheReads.org. She lives in the rolling hills outside Nashville, Tennessee, with her husband, four sons, and black Lab—who is, thankfully, a girl. (Author Photo © Kristee Mays Photography)
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Claire Lombardo
author of The Most Fun We Ever Had

author chatClaire Lombardo earned her MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Prior to writing The Most Fun We Ever Had, she spent several years doing social work in Chicago. She was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. (Author Photo © Michael Lionstar)
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Megha Majumdar
author of A Burning

author chatMegha 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. A Burning is her first book. (Author Photo © Elena Seibert)
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Lucas Mann
author of Captive Audience

author chatLucas 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)
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Tiffany McDaniel
author of Betty

author chatTiffany 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)
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Kamin Mohammadi
author of Bella Figura

author chatKamin 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)
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Violet Moller
author of The Map of Knowledge

author chatViolet 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. The Map of Knowledge is her first narrative history. (Author Photo © Paula Jayne)
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Meg Mitchell Moore
author of The Captain’s Daughter

author chatMeg Mitchell Moore is the author of the novels The Admissions, The Arrivals and So Far Away. She worked for several years as a journalist for a variety of publications. She lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts, with her husband and three daughters. (Author Photo © Courtney Trembler)
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Mary Morris
author of All the Way to the Tigers

author chatMary 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)
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Alix Nathan
author of The Warlow Experiment

author chatAlix 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)
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Rhiannon Navin
author of Only Child

author chatRhiannon 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)
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Alix Ohlin
author of Dual Citizens

author chatAlix 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)
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Kimberly King Parsons
author of Black Light

author chatBorn 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)
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Julia Phillips
author of Disappearing Earth

author chatJulia 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)
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Massimo Pigliucci
author of How to Live a Good Life

author chatSocrates 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.
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Lara Prescott
author of The Secrets We Kept

author chatLara 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)
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Joanna Rakoff
author of My Salinger Year

author chatJoanna 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)
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Sarah Ramey
author of The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

author chatSarah 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)
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Maria Reva
author of Good Citizens Need Not Fear

author chatMaria 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)
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Will Schwalbe
author of Books for Living

author chatWill 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)
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Casey Schwartz
author of Attention: A Love Story

author chatCasey Schwartz is the author of Attention: A Love Story and In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis. She contributes regularly to The New York Times and lives in New York City. (Author Photo © Beowulf Sheehan)
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Stephanie Scott
author of What’s Left of Me Is Yours

author chatStephanie 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)
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Maggie Shipstead
author of Astonish Me

author chatMaggie Shipstead is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first novel, Seating Arrangements, was a New York Times best seller, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. (Author Photo © Michelle Legro)
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Kory Stamper
author of Word by Word

author chatKory 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)
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Melanie Sumner
author of How to Write a Novel

author chatMelanie 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)
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Rufi Thorpe
author of The Knockout Queen

author chatRufi Thorpe received her MFA from the University of Virginia in 2009. Her first novel, The Girls from Corona del Mar, was long-listed for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. A California native, she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons. (Author Photo © Nina Subin)
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Rebecca Watson
author of little scratch

author chatRebecca 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)
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