The Muse 2012

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The Muse 2012 | 2012 Presenter Bios

Muse Keynote Speaker: Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez is the author of five novels, including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo! In the Name of Salomé, and Saving the World. She has also published four books of poems, including Homecoming and The Other Side/El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, as well as a book of essays, a work of non-fiction, Once Upon a Quinceañera, and many books for young readers. Alvarez is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. She is also the founder, with her husband Bill Eichner, of Alta Gracia, an organic farm-literacy arts center, in her homeland of the Dominican Republic. Her book, A Cafecito Story, is a modern “green” fable based on this project. She is the recipient of many awards, including the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature. Her books have been translated in eighteen countries and several of them have been adapted for film and the stage. Her latest work of non-fiction, A Wedding in Haiti, will be published in Spring 2012 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Marketplace Keynote Speaker: Richard Nash

Richard Nash is VP of Community and Content of Small Demons, founder of Cursor, and Publisher of Red Lemonade. He ran the iconic Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. Books he published landed on bestseller lists from the Boston Globe to the Singapore Straits-Times; on the Best of the Year lists from The Guardian to the Toronto Globe & Mail to the Los Angeles Times; his final book was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Last year the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and Mashable.com picked him as the #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape of Publishing.

Guest Authors, Agents, Editors, Panelists, & Special Guests

Cara Blue Adams (Magazine Editor): Cara Blue Adams is the fiction and nonfiction editor of The Southern Review. Her stories and reviews have appeared in Narrative, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sun, and elsewhere. Work she has acquired and edited has appeared in or been listed as notable by Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was named one of Narrative’s “15 Below 30.”

Chimamanda Adichie (Author): Chimamanda Adichie grew up in Nigeria. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun and the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. She is a MacArthur Foundation fellow and was included in the New Yorker magazine's "Twenty Under Forty" list. Her work has been translated into thirty languages.
Session 4B: Fiction Matters

Julia Alvarez (Author): Julia Alvarez is the author of five novels, including How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo! In the Name of Salomé, and Saving the World. She has also published four books of poems, including Homecoming and The Other Side/El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, as well as a book of essays, a work of non-fiction, Once Upon a Quinceañera, and many books for young readers. Alvarez is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. She is also the founder, with her husband Bill Eichner, of Alta Gracia, an organic farm-literacy arts center, in her homeland of the Dominican Republic. Her book, A Cafecito Story, is a modern “green” fable based on this project. She is the recipient of many awards, including the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature. Her books have been translated in eighteen countries and several of them have been adapted for film and the stage. Her latest work of non-fiction, A Wedding in Haiti, will be published in Spring 2012 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Keynote Address by Julia Alvarez

Jason Allen Ashlock (Literary Agent): President of Movable Type Management, Jason Allen Ashlock founded the company in the spring of 2009, after completing graduate studies in Religion and in American literature. In its first two and a half years, he inked 70 deals with major publishers, and grew the company to manage more than 150 authors across categories. His client list is populated by non-fiction authors in history, biography, memoir, current affairs, politics, and pop culture. Advocating for radical mediation as an agent philosophy, Jason leads Movable Type to partnerships with an array of digital developers and marketing specialists and oversees the development of new books and digital properties by the company’s authors. He teaches Digital Publishing at CUNY, City College.
Session 3L: You're the Boss: The Writer as Entrepreneur
Session 4L: The World Is Your Oyster: The Unprecedented Opportunities of the Digital Age

Marilyn Atlas (Literary Manager & Producer): An award-winning producer and personal manager, Marilyn R. Atlas is equally at home in the worlds of film, television, and live theater. Among her credits as film producer are Real Women Have Curves for HBO, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, A Certain Desire, starring Sam Waterston, and Echoes, which won the Gold Award at the Texas International Film Festival. In addition to producing a variety of programming for the TV market, Marilyn has served as a production consultant on the film Call Me. She was also involved as a producer in the development of the MOW Nightwalker and Playing for Keeps. In live theater, Marilyn co-produced the West Coast premiere of the musical God Bless You Mr. Rosewater by Ashman and Menken (the writers of both Enchanted and Tangled). She also co-produced the award-winning play To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, which was made into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Peter Gallagher.

Marilyn has been a guest at various colleges, including Skyline, Stephens, and at the University of Texas – San Antonio’s Adalante Latino Film Festival. She has served as the professional-in-residence (in theater and film) at Ball State University, and was the speaker at the International Writer’s Conference at Hollins University (2010). She structured an intensive course at Skyline College in San Francisco covering the inception, development and promotion of a script in The Business of Screenwriting: The Idea – and its Execution. She is also featured in the book Write Now! from Penguin/Tarcher Publishing, released January 2011. In 2012 she will be developing the forthcoming YA novel Choked (Scholastic, Spring 2012) for a television movie, as well as co-producing the play Detained in the Desert in San Antonio.

Sarah Banse (Author): Sarah Banse is a Dean's Fellow at Emerson College. She is a senior reader and editorial assistant at Ploughshares. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, The Boston Globe, and Errant Parent. She has received awards from the Pen Women and in 2011 was named one of Boston's top MFA students by Kneerim and Williams Literary Agency. She was a 2010 contributor at Bread Loaf.
Option 3: Flash Fiction: Jumpstart Your Writing

Stephen Barr (Literary Agent): Stephen Barr spent the first 21 years of his life in Southern California, and the only thing he really knew about publishing before he moved to New York City was Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Terry Crabtree in Wonder Boys — he’s an editor, and he flies into Pittsburgh (wearing a big, comfy looking east coast coat) to coax a second novel out of his troubled but probably brilliant author, and then come the hijinks. That sounded pretty swell, so Barr read Wonder Boys on the flight over to New York. Over the course of six or seven months of interviews and internships, he realized that he still wanted the coat and the authors, but would be more comfortable playing the role, so to speak, of their agent (though editing is perhaps his favorite thing in the whole wide world, and he works very closely with his clients to polish and perfect their manuscripts before and after submission). Barr landed at Writers House in 2008, became its biggest fan about four seconds later, started taking on his own clients in 2010, and just got his coat back from the dry cleaner.
Session 4K: Query Lab

Lynne Barrett (Author)

Lynne Barrett is the author of the story collections Magpies, The Secret Names of Women, and The Land of Go. She is editor of Tigertail: Florida Flash and co-editor of the anthology Birth: A Literary Companion. She has received the Edgar Allan Poe award of the Mystery Writers of America for best mystery story and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her recent work has been published in Blue Christmas, Night Train, The Written Wardrobe, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Delta Blues, The Southern Women’s Review, The Review Review, and many other anthologies and literary magazines. Editor of The Florida Book Review, she is a professor at Florida International University, where she teaches in the MFA program. You can read more at www.lynnebarrett.com.

Session 1C: Mapping Your Story: Place, Movement, Territory

Session 4D: Disentangling Time

Alison Bass (Author): Alison Bass is a Pulitzer Prize nominee and author of Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial, which won the NASW Science in Society Award for 2009. She was a longtime medical and science writer for The Boston Globe and has also written for The Miami Herald, Psychology Today and Technology Review, among other publications. A series she wrote for The Boston Globe on psychiatry was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and she has received many other journalism awards. In 2007, she won a prestigious Alicia Patterson Fellowship to write Side Effects. Bass teaches journalism at Mount Holyoke College and Brandeis University and writes a regular blog on conflicts of interest in medicine at alison-bass.com/blog.
Option 6: Telling True Stories

Nichole Bernier (Author): Nichole Bernier’s debut novel, The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D, will be published this June by Crown/Random House. She has been a contributing editor with Condé Nast Traveler magazine for 14 years, and was previously on staff as a features writer, columnist and television spokesperson. In 2010, she and a group of Boston writers launched the literary blog Beyond the Margins (beyondthemargins.com), offering a daily mix of craft and business insights and author interviews. Nichole received her master’s degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was given the school’s annual award for literary journalism. She has written for magazines including Elle, Self, Health, and Men’s Journal, and taught creative writing for Boston Center of Adult Education. She lives west of Boston with her husband and five children, and can be found online at nicholebernier.com and on Twitter @nicholebernier.
Session 6K: Best Practices for Using Social Media: A Guide for Writers Already Online

Stuart Bernstein (Special Guest): Stuart Bernstein is an independent literary agent based in New York City. A former bookseller, he founded his agency, Stuart Bernstein Representation for Artists, in 1995, and works with writers of adult literary fiction and non-fiction in all categories. The agency also represents translators. Recently published clients include Diana Beresford-Kroeger, Richard Blanco, H. G. Carrillo, Alyssa Harad, Leslie Larson, Cherríe Moraga, Manuel Muñoz, Jim Robbins, James Schwartz, Rosie Sultan and Helena María Viramontes.
Session 2K: Literary Idol

Sharon Bially (Author): Sharon Bially is the independent author of the novel Veronica’s Nap. Vice President of the PR firm Farrell Kramer Communications, she also publicizes a select list of books. She's is the Indie Alley book review editor at Reader Unboxed and a guest contributor to the award-winning blog Writer Unboxed. Visit Sharon's web site and blog at www.veronicas-nap.com.
Option 4: Who's Afraid of Amazon?

Robin Black (Author): Robin Black’s debut story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, was a finalist in the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a Summer Reading Pick in O: The Oprah Magazine and a Best Book of 2010 in The San Francisco Chronicle and The Irish Times. The book, which will be published in seven countries, also won the 2010 Atheneaum of Philadelphia Literary Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, One Story, The Georgia Review and Conde Nast Traveler UK. She is the Fiction Editor of Inch, Contributing Editor to Colorado Review and a member of the Boston-based blog Beyond The Margins (www.beyondthemargins.com). In the Fall of 2012, she will be the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bryn Mawr College.
Session 5B: And In The End...

Clark Blaise (Author): Clark Blaise’s latest book is entitled The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis) 2011. Author of twenty earlier books spanning various subjects and fields, Blaise has authored nine story-collections, three novels, and focuses on memoirs, travel, investigative, and intellectual history. Some of Blaise’s titles include Resident Alien, I Had a Father, Days and Nights in Calcutta, The Sorrow and the Terror, and Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.
Session 5H: Building A Story, from the First Sentence (and Before)

Dan Blank (Panelist): Dan Blank is the founder of WeGrowMedia.com, which provides writers and publishers the strategy and tactics they need to impact their communities and build their legacies. He has worked with more than 500 writers, a wide range of publishers, and regularly speaks at conferences about branding, content strategy, social media, and marketing. You can follow him on Twitter at @DanBlank and read his blog at WeGrowMedia.com.
Session 3L: You're the Boss: The Writer As Entrepreneur

Jessica Anya Blau (Author): Jessica Anya Blau’s newest novel, Drinking Closer to Home (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial), has been called "a raging success" and "unrelentingly side-splittingly funny." It was featured in Target stores as a "Breakout Book" and made many Best Books of the Year lists for 2011. Her first novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial), was picked as a Best Summer Book by The Today Show, The New York Post and New York Magazine. The San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers chose it as one of the Best Books of the Year. Jessica’s third novel, The Wonder Bread Summer (HarperCollins/Harper Perennial) is coming out in the summer of 2013. Jessica wrote the screenplay for Franny, a film staring Frances Fisher and Steve Howey. Franny is now in post-production in Los Angeles. Currently Jessica is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Goucher College. She also teaches at Johns Hopkins University where she attended The Writing Seminars.
Option 10: The Perils of Fictionalizing Your Family

Lisa Borders (Author): Lisa Borders' first novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing's Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel and was published in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land also received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her essay Enchanted Night was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Lisa has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Newport Review and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and fellowships at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. More information on Lisa and her work is available at lisaborders.com.
Session 4E: The Essentials of the Novel

Michael Borum (Special Guest)

Michael Borum is a Boston-based digital strategist, designer, and developer, with 18 years experience in web-based marketing and communications. In 2002, he started his own boutique practice, etherweave, where he has focused on providing digital marketing services to authors, publishers, literary agencies, small non-profits, and educators. He has worked with over 50 published authors across a full spectrum of fiction, journalism, creative non-fiction, memoir, essay, and poetry. Since 2007, Michael has also worked as the Web Manager at Oxfam America, a branch of the global non-profit organization dedicated to ending poverty and injustice.

Session 6K: Best Practices for Using Social Media: A Guide for Writers Already Online

Option 10: Social Media for Writers: A Guide for Writers Already Online

Eve Bridburg (Special Guest)

Recently named one of Boston’s 50 most powerful women by Boston Magazine, Eve founded Grub Street in the spring of 1997. In 2005, Eve joined the Boston office of The Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary and Entertainment Agency, where she developed, edited, and sold a wide variety of books to major publishers including Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Grand Central, Abrams, and St. Martins. Her titles include Donovan Campbell’s New York Times Best Seller Joker One, blogger Matt Logelin’s New York Times Best seller Two Kisses for Maddy, Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s critically acclaimed short story collection Doctor Olaf Van Schuler's Brain, and Len Rosen’s Edgar-nominated thriller All Cry Chaos. Eve also developed a list of expert-driven parenting, health, and spiritual titles by working closely with experts and collaborative writers in an effort to bring cutting edge thinking and research to trade audiences.

Returning to Grub Street as Executive Director in April 2010, Eve’s mission has been to expand offerings to better educate and equip writers to take full advantage of the new opportunities ushered in by the digital age and to make Grub Street as dynamic by day as it is by night. Under her leadership, Grub Street has launched new innovative programming, planned a move and expansion in downtown Boston, grown enrollment by 60%, and actively engaged board members, donors, students, and members in our mission like never before. Eve has presented on publishing, the future of publishing, and on what it takes to build a literary arts center at numerous national conferences, including the Whidbey Island Writers Conference, The Sanibel Island Writers Conference, Writers at Work in Utah and AWP.

Session 3L: You're the Boss: The Writer As Entrepreneur
Session 4L: The World Is Your Oyster: The Unprecedented Opportunities of the Digital Age

Regina Brooks (Literary Agent): Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency LLC, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her agency has represented and established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. She has held senior editorial positions at John Wiley and Sons, and McGraw-Hill companies. Brooks is the author of the titles Never Finished Never Done (Scholastic), Writing Great Books For Young Adults (Source Books), the forthcoming title You (Really) Should Write A Book: Writing, Selling And Marketing Your Memoir (St. Martin’s Press), and has edited over nearly 100 titles and was blogger for the Huffington Post. Brooks is also on the faculty of the Harvard University publishing course and the Whidbey Island Writers MFA program and annually teaches at more than twenty worldwide conferences. She has been highlighted in global media outlets including Forbes, Media Bistro, Essence Magazine, Ebony Magazine, Writer's Digest Magazine, The Writer, and Publishers Weekly. In November 2010, she launched a new publishing imprint called Open Lens.
Session 4J: Industry Guide to Publishing: Young Adult

Deni Y. Béchard (Author): Deni Y. Béchard was born in British Columbia to French Canadian and American parents and grew up in both Canada and the United States. He has also traveled in over forty countries. He recently published Cures for Hunger (2012, Milkweed Editions), a memoir about growing up with his father who was a bank robber. His first novel, Vandal Love (2006, Doubleday Canada; 2012, Milkweed Editions), was published in French and Arabic, and won the 2007 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, both for the best first book in Canada and for the best overall first book in the British Commonwealth. It was also nominated for Le Prix du Grand Public Salon du Livre Montréal / La Presse, 2008, as well as the French version of Canada Reads (Le Combat des Livres, 2009). On four occasions, he has been a recipient of Canada Council and Québec Arts Council Grants, and he has been a fellow at MacDowell, Jentel, the Edward Albee Foundation, Ledig House, the Anderson Center and Vermont Studio Center, among others. His articles, stories and translations have appeared in a number of magazines and newspapers, among them the National Post, Maisonneuve, Le Devoir, the Harvard Review and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. He has done freelance reporting from Northern Iraq as well as Afghanistan. He is currently working on Empty Hands, Open Arms (forthcoming with Milkweed Editions), a book about conservationism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Session 6F: Criminals and Outsiders in Fiction and Memoir

Wendy Call (Author)

Wendy Call has served as Writer in Residence at more than a dozen institutions, including universities, high schools, art centers, a public hospital and a national park. (Recent locales include Cornell College in Iowa, New College of Florida, Harborview Medical Center, Richard Hugo House, and Seattle University). She co-edited Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide (Penguin, 2007). Her narrative nonfiction book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (Nebraska, 2011) won Grub Street’s 2011 National Book Prize for Nonfiction. Her current writing projects—creative nonfiction, personal essay, and poetry translation—are supported by the King County arts and culture commission, Seattle’s Jack Straw Foundation, and the K2 Foundation of Maine. She lives in Seattle and works as a writer, translator (from Spanish), editor, and educator. Before turning to full-time word-working in 2000, she devoted a decade to work for social change organizations in Seattle and Boston.

Session 3C: Make A Scene!

National Book Prize Reading and Reception

Jennifer Carlson (Literary Agent): Jennifer Carlson is an agent at Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency where she works with narrative nonfiction writers and journalists covering cultural history and current events and ideas, as well as literary and upmarket commercial novelists. On the children’s side, she is most interested in young adult and middle grade fiction and a very select number of picture book projects. Her clients include Marisa de los Santos, David Schickler, Kevin Brockmeier, Jon Raymond, Debbie Nathan, Paul Reyes, Robert Neuwirth, and Mary Quattlebaum. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Session 5L: Literary Idol

Matt Cavnar (Panelist): Matthew is the VP of Business Development at Vook where he extends Vook's cloud-based ePublishing platform to content holders everywhere. At Vook, Matthew has produced the award-winning JFK:50 Days enhanced eBook with NBC and Perseus, Unleashing the Super IdeaVirus with Seth Godin, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth with Google, as well as a variety of eBook projects for Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Harvard Business Review, Franklin Covey, HayHouse and Hachette.
Session 4L: The World Is Your Oyster: The Unprecedented Opportunities of the Digital Age

Colin Channer (Author): Colin Channer is the father of two children, and a failed reggae musician. In addition to this, he is a fiction writer, occasional essayist, university professor and curator of arts programming. He is a dual citizen of the United States, where he's lived since 1982, and the island of Jamaica, where he was born in 1963. His five works of fiction include the bestselling novel Waiting In Vain, a Critic's Choice selection of the Washington Post, which described it as "a clear redefinition of the Caribbean novel." Colin's most recent book is the novella The Girl With the Golden Shoes, which was hailed by Russell Banks as "a nearly perfect moral fable." His personal essays and reviews have appeared in among other places the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Short list of academic positions: Fannie Hurst Writer in Residence, Brandeis University; Susan and Donald Newhouse Professor in Creative Writing, Wellesley College; Visiting Artist in Residence, Columbia College Chicago. Short list of honors: Silver Musgrave Medal for Achievement in the Field of Literature; Washington Post Spring Pick selection for The Girl With the Golden Shoes; Washington Post Critic's Choice selection for Waiting In Vain.
Session 5J: The Scenario: the Global Currency of Fiction

Alexander Chee (Author)

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and the forthcoming The Queen of the Night. He is a recipient of the Whiting Award, the NEA in fiction, the MCCA in Fiction and residencies from MacDowell, Civitella and Leidig House, and his essays and stories have appeared in The Morning News, Out, The Paris Review Daily and Granta.com, among others, and are widely anthologized. He has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Columbia University, Amherst College and the New School. He blogs at Koreanish.com and lives in New York.

Option 1: The Breakthrough

Session 6A: Revising the Novel

Chip Cheek (Author): Chip Cheek's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Harvard Review, Washington Square, Night Train, Quick Fiction, and Minnetonka Review, among other publications. His stories also appear in the current edition of the textbook What If: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter (Longman, 2009), and Brevity and Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories (Rose Metal Press, 2006). He is the recipient of a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award for 2011, as well as a work-study scholarship to the 2011 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Session 2E: The Essentials of Character

Jaime Clarke (Author): Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel We're So Famous (Bloomsbury USA), editor of the anthologies Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster), Conversations with Jonathan Lethem (University Press of Mississippi), co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine (Dzanc), with Mary Cotton, and the forthcoming Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic), with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton. He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore. He curates Baum's Bazaar at baumsbazaar.com.
Option 1: My First Time

Ann Collette (Literary Agent): Ann Collette was a freelance writer and editor before joining the Rees Literary Agency in 2000. Her list includes books by Barbara Shapiro, Mark Russinovich, Steven Sidor, Vicki Lane, Carol Carr, Clay and Susan Griffith, and Chrystle Fiedler. She likes literary, mystery, thrillers, suspense, vampire, and commercial women's fiction; in non-fiction, she prefers narrative non-fiction, military & war, work to do with race & class, and work set in or about Southeast Asia. Ann does not represent children's, YA, sci-fi, or high fantasy.
Session 5L: Literary Idol

Gina Damico (Author): Gina Damico grew up under four feet of snow in Syracuse, New York. She received a degree in theater and sociology from Boston College, and has since worked as a tour guide, transcriptionist, theater house manager, scenic artist, movie extra, office troll, retail monkey, yarn hawker and breadmonger. Croak is her first novel. She lives outside Boston with her husband, two cats, and a closet full of black hoodies.
Option 11: Out of the Slush Pile and Into Print in YA/MG Publishing

Carole DeSanti (Author)

Carole DeSanti is Vice President, Editor-at-Large at the Penguin Group. A long-time acquisitions editor, she is known for championing high-quality independent voices in fiction. DeSanti has been profiled in Poets & Writers Magazine, published in the Women’s Review of Books and awarded fellowships at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center and Hedgebrook. For over a decade she has been clandestinely writing a novel, The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R., forthcoming from Houghton Harcourt in March 2012.

Session 2M: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Session 4M: Commitment and The Novel

Stacia J. N. Decker (Literary Agent): Stacia J. N. Decker joined the Donald Maass Literary Agency in 2009. A former editor at Harcourt and Otto Penzler Books, she began her career at Farrar, Straus & Giroux after earning an MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia University. She represents noir, crime fiction, literary fiction, literary suspense, and cross-genre fiction with speculative elements. Among her clients are Frank Bill, Joelle Charbonneau, Adam Christopher, Cassandra Rose Clarke, Seth Harwood, John Hornor Jacobs, Owen Laukkanen, Fiona Maazel, Jeff Shelby, Jay Stringer, Chuck Wendig, and Frank Wheeler.
Session 2M: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Anita Diamant (Author): Anita Diamant is the author of eleven books. Her first novel, The Red Tent, published in 1997, won the 2001 Booksense Book of the Year Award. A word-of-mouth bestseller in the US, it has been published in more than 25 countries. Her other novels include Good Harbor, The Last Days of Dogtown, and most recently Day after Night, which is set in 1945 in Palestine and tells the story of four young Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Diamant has written six non-fiction guides to contemporary Jewish life, including The New Jewish Wedding and How to Raise a Jewish Child. An award-winning journalist, her articles have appeared in many publications including The Boston Globe and Parenting Magazine.
Session 6H: Ask the Authoress

April Eberhardt (Literary Agent): April Eberhardt Literary specializes in high-quality women's fiction: thoughtful, carefully crafted narratives by, for, and about women, the kind of books that generate interest and insights among women's book club members. The agency also represents selected Young Adult works, particularly those aimed at prompting meaningful discussion between mothers and daughters about relationships, values, and decision-making. As readers and publishers choose among the many ways literature is being delivered in the new millennium, authors need a literary agent who understands both the traditional and electronic marketplaces, along with the evolving role of self-publishing, done right. April founded her agency in order to assist and advise authors as they navigate the increasingly complex world of publishing. After 25 years as a corporate strategist and consultant, April Eberhardt joined the literary world as head reader for Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary magazine, followed by five years as an agent with two San Francisco-based literary agencies. She holds an MBA from Boston University in Marketing and Finance, a BA from Hamilton (Kirkland) College in Anthropology and French, and a CPLF degree from the University of Paris. She divides her time between San Francisco, New York, and Paris.
Session 3L: You're the Boss: The Writer as Entrepreneur

Barry Eisler (Author)

Barry Eisler spent three years in a covert position with the CIA's Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center along the way. Eisler's bestselling thrillers have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year, have been included in numerous "Best Of" lists, and have been translated into nearly 20 languages. Eisler lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and, when he's not writing novels, blogs about torture, civil liberties, and the rule of law. For more info, see www.barryeisler.com.

Session 2C: The Craft of the Thriller

Option 4: Who's Afraid of Amazon?

Hallie Ephron (Author): Hallie Ephron (hallieephron.com) is a writer, book reviewer, and writing teacher. She writes books she hopes will keep readers up at night. Her latest suspense novel, Come and Find Me, from William Morrow, follows her Never Tell a Lie which was a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and for the Salt Lake Libraries Readers Choice Award, and won the David Award for best mystery of 2009. It was made into the TV movie And Baby Will Fall for the Lifetime Movie Network. A book lover, Hallie is also the author of The Bibliophile's Devotional and 1001 Books for Every Mood. She writes a crime fiction book review column for The Boston Globe. Her Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel was an Edgar Award finalist.
Session 4C: Details Make (Or Break) a Character: Why it Pays to Sweat the Small Stuff

Delia Ephron (Author): Delia Ephron is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. Her novel, The Lion Is In, will be published on March 29th, 2012 by Penguin. She is the author of numerous books – fiction, non-fiction, humor, teen, and children's – including Hanging Up and the best-selling How to Eat Like a Child. Her movies include The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, You've Got Mail, and Michael. She is the co-author with her sister Nora Ephron of the play Love Loss and What I Wore, which has been playing for over two years off Broadway and has been performed around the world, including Paris, Rio and Sydney. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Oprah Magazine and other publications.
Session 2B: No Drama Without Conflict

Elizabeth Evans (Literary Agent): Elizabeth Evans is an agent at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, where she represents a wide range of nonfiction, including memoir, current affairs, journalism, psychology, pop science, history, humor and relationships. She is always on the lookout for stories of adventure and books that aspire to foster knowledge and understanding. She especially enjoys reading about food and travel. Before joining JVNLA in January 2010, Elizabeth worked for six years with Kimberley Cameron & Associates (formerly the Reece Halsey Agency) in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hamilton College with a degree in English Literature and holds an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Her recent titles include Thomas Peele's Killing The Messenger, Doug Mack's Europe On Five Wrong Turns A Day, and Mari Ruti's The Case For Falling In Love.
Session 3M: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Sorche Fairbank (Literary Agent)

Since establishing Fairbank Literary Representation in 2002, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank has had the pleasure of working with a dynamic and varied list, representing best-selling authors, Edgar recipients, award-winning journalists, and many first-time authors. Her tastes in novels tend toward literary fiction, international voices, women's voices, edgier work, wry voices, and sometimes darker topics. On the nonfiction side, she is all about narrative. She has a strong interest in books that tackle current events and societal issues with a narrative treatment: women's issues; class and race issues; plus the occasional memoir. She is also looking for quality lifestyle books (food, wine, and home design), humor, and pop culture. To date, she has signed on six terrific clients through Grub Street, the latest for whom she struck a deal worth over a million dollars for book and film. Subjects and genres not of interest include: sci-fi and fantasy, paranormal, children's and YA, self-help, romance, sports fiction, and generally anything that opens with a dream scene and/or exhaustive descriptions of weather. Notable authors and books represented by Fairbank Literary include: O. Henry Prize winner Charlotte Forbes; Pulitzer nominee and LA Times Cairo Bureau Chief Jeffrey Fleishman; Matthew Frederick and his best-selling 101 Things I Learned series; Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development and author of Solar Revolution; Ethan Gilsdorf (Fantasty Freaks and Gaming Geeks); Darci Klein (To Full Term, A Mother's Triumph Over Miscarriage); Jonathan McCullough (A Tale Of Two Subs: An Untold Story Of World War II, Two Sister Ships, And Extraordinary Heroism); the estate of Robin Moore (The French Connection, The Green Berets, etc.); Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker); syndicated cartoonist Man Martin; Edgar-winning mystery writer Rex Burns; Terry Border and his Bent Objects; and the fabulous Miroslav Penkov (East of the West). Updated information on Sorche Fairbank and Fairbank Literary, their clients, and recent deals can be found here.

Session 2K: Literary Idol

Session 4K: Query Lab

Katherine Fausset (Literary Agent): Katherine Fausset has been an agent with Curtis Brown, Ltd. in New York since 2006. She represents a range of adult fiction and nonfiction, including literary and commercial fiction, journalism, memoir, lifestyle, as well as prescriptive and narrative nonfiction. Prior to Curtis Brown, she worked at the Watkins/Loomis Agency. She has worked in book publishing since 1999.
Session 1K: What Agents Want

Seth Fishman (Literary Agent): Seth joined The Gernert Company after beginning his career as an agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. in 2005. Born in Midland, Texas, he graduated from Princeton University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. His interests are wide-ranging, but they boil down in particular to literary and commercial fiction, popular (fun) science, young adult, humor, sci-fi/fantasy and graphic novels (of both a traditional and literary bent). His clients include: Tea Obreht, Maggie Koerth-Baker, Erik Bergstrom, Molly Crabapple, Theo Ellsworth, Shawn Goodman (2009 Delacorte Prize winner), Ted Kosmatka, Keren Landman, Will McIntosh, Matthew Olshan and Nate Powell.

Kate Flora (Author): Attorney Kate Flora’s eleven books include seven Thea Kozak mysteries, two gritty police procedurals including The Angel of Knowlton Park, a suspense thriller, and Steal Away, written as Katharine Clark. A true crime, Finding Amy, was a 2007 Edgar nominee and has been optioned for a movie. Her current projects include Death Dealer, a true crime involving a Canadian serial killer, a screenplay, and a novel in linked stories. Flora’s short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Sara Paretsky edited collection, Sisters on the Case. She is a former editor and publisher at Level Best books, former international president of Sisters in Crime, and a founding member of the New England Crime Bake conference. Her story All that Glitters appears in Dead Calm, and her story, Bone China in the crime story anthology Dead of Winter. Her third Joe Burgess police procedural, Redemption, was published in February.
Session 5E: Essential Elements of the Mystery Novel

Katherine Flynn (Literary Agent): Katherine Flynn joined the Kneerim & Williams Literary Agency in 2008. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, Katherine worked at the literary agency of Nicholas Ellison/Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, Inc. in New York. She then pursued her PhD in History at Brown University, where she is now ABD. Prior to joining Kneerim & Williams, Katherine edited history books at the publishing company of Bedford/St. Martin's. She has also taught English literature and composition to high school students and has worked in a rare bookshop. Katherine represents history, biography, politics/current affairs, adventure, nature, pop culture, and the occasional health and fitness topic for non-fiction and particularly loves exciting narrative nonfiction, where the truth is a story more fascinating than anything else. For fiction, she represents both literary and commercial fiction.
Session 6L: Building Your Platform

Lizzie K. Foley (Author)

Lizzie K. Foley was born and raised in New Mexico, but currently lives in Montclair, NJ with her husband (poet Jon F. Wilkins), her son, and four poorly trained dogs. Her middle-grade novel Remarkable will be available from Dial/Penguin on April 12. Her website is lizziekfoley.com and you can follow her on twitter at @lizziekfoley.

Option 11: Out of the Slush Pile and Into Print in YA/MG Publishing

Mary Gannon (Special Guest)

Mary Gannon is the Editorial Director of the literary nonprofit organization Poets & Writers, Inc., where she oversees the publication of Poets & Writers Magazine in its print and digital editions, as well as the production of the Poets & Writers' website, PW.org. She has worked at Poets & Writers since 1996, serving as editor of the magazine from 2005 to 2009. She is also co-editor of the book The Practical Writer: From Inspiration to Publication (Penguin, 2004). She has taught writing as a faculty associate at Arizona State University in Tempe, where she received her master of fine arts degree in poetry. Her many articles and interviews with writers such as David Remnick, Anne Carson, and John Haskell, have appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, and her book reviews in the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, Chelsea Magazine, and Poetry International. Her poetry has been published in The Antioch Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Paris Review, SHADE, and Washington Square, among other literary journals.

Session 2M: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Option 12: Writing for Poets and Writers: The Editor Tells All

Ethan Gilsdorf (Author)

Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the travel memoir/pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, named a Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Book Awards. A poet, teacher, critic and journalist, Gilsdorf has worked as a freelance correspondent, guidebook writer, and film, book and restaurant reviewer in Paris as well as the US. Now based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor, and has been published in dozens of other magazines, newspapers and guidebooks worldwide, including National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Australian Financial Review, USA Today, and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe and the film columnist for Art New England. His blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com, and he also blogs for Boston.com's Globetrotting, Tor.com, and TheOneRing.net. As a poet, he is the winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, and has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP), volunteers as a guest speaker in the Boston Public Schools and leads creative writing workshops in journalism, travel and essay writing, and poetry, as well as book promotion and writing career planning workshops at Grub Street, Emerson College, and Media Bistro. He speaks frequently at conventions, universities, and book festivals nationwide. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Grub Street. Follow Ethan’s adventures at ethangilsdorf.com.

Session 2L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Non-Fiction

Option 5: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Writers

Session 4G: The Self As Character

Mollie Glick (Literary Agent): After graduating from Brown University, Mollie began her publishing career as a literary scout, advising foreign publishers regarding the acquisition of rights to American books. She then worked as an editor at the Crown imprint of Random House, before switching over to the other side and becoming an agent in 2003. Mollie's list includes literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, and a bit of practical non-fiction. She's particularly interested in fiction that bridges the literary/commercial divide, combining strong writing with a great, high-concept plot, YA, and non-fiction dealing with popular science, medicine, psychology, cultural history, memoir, and current events. She's very hands-on, working collaboratively with her authors to refine their projects, and then focusing on identifying the right editors for submissions. Some of her recent projects include New York Times bestseller Jonathan Evison’s West of Here (Algonquin); Ellen Bryson’s The Transformation Of Bartholomew Fortuno (Henry Holt); Elizabeth Black’s The Drowning House (Nan A. Talese); Dr. Tracy Alloway’s The New IQ (The Free Press); Lenore Skenazy’s Free Range Kids (Jossey Bass); Josephine Angelini’s Starcrossed (Harper Teen); and Gennifer Albin’s Crewel (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). In addition to her work as a literary agent, Mollie also teaches classes on non-fiction proposal writing at Media Bistro, and her instructional articles on non-fiction proposal writing and query letter writing have been featured in Writer's Digest.
Session 1K: What Agents Want

Meredith Goldstein (Author): Meredith Goldstein is an advice columnist, entertainment reporter, and young adult book reviewer for The Boston Globe. Her column Love Letters is a daily dispatch of wisdom for the lovelorn that gets about 1 million page views every month on Boston.com, and appears in the Globe’s print edition every Saturday. Meredith's first novel The Singles will be released by Penguin/Plume on April 24, 2012. It's been optioned for film by Lime Orchard Productions, which made the Oscar-nominated A Better Life. Meredith was born in New Jersey, raised in Maryland, went to Syracuse University, and now lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts, with a carnival-size cotton candy machine that she bought for herself on her 30th birthday. Visit her at meredithgoldstein.com.
Session 5K: Promotion and Publicity

Lynne Griffin (Author)

Lynne Griffin is the author of Sea Escape–A novel(Simon & Schuster, 2010) and Life Without Summer–A novel (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). She is a nationally recognized expert on relationships and family life and the author of the nonfiction guide Negotiation Generation: Take Back Your Parental Authority Without Punishment (Penguin, 2007). As the family life contributor for Boston’s Fox 25 Morning News, she appears regularly in the segments Family Works and Family Life Stories featuring important family life topics and recommended books. In addition to teaching fiction at Grub Street, Lynne teaches family studies at the undergraduate and graduate level at Wheelock College in Boston. In February 2012 she completed a semester as a visiting scholar in Singapore through Wheelock's Center for International Education, Leadership, and Innovation. For more about Lynne's work visit her website and her Psychology Today blog, Field Guide to Families.

Session 1K: What Agents Want

Session 2J: At Stake: Building Tension in Fiction

Robert Guinsler (Literary Agent): Robert has been with Sterling Lord Literistic for over ten years. His primary interests include literary and commercial fiction (including YA), journalism, narrative nonfiction with an emphasis on pop culture, science and current events, memoirs and biographies. Robert's clients include Pulitzer Prize winning journalists, novelists and academics. With a journalism background, Robert is interested in all kinds of nonfiction subjects and he has represented such authors as New York Times bestselling author and Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, Adam Bradley, Mark Kurzem, David Folkenflik, Sarah Colonna and Charles London. Robert’s interest in fiction includes literary and commercial fiction, as well as young adult and middle grade. His fiction writers include Samantha Peale, Vanina Marsot, Barnes and Noble Discover pick Doug Crandell, Brian Farrey and Grant Jerkins. Additionally, Robert represents the Estate of Jack Kerouac and the Estate of Anne Sexton.

Paul Harding (Author): Paul Harding is the author of the novel Tinkers, which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His second novel, Enon, is forthcoming and will be published by Random House. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the PEN American Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers. Harding received his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Harvard University, and Grinnell College. Before he began to write, Harding played drums for the rock band Cold Water Flat.
Option 1: My First Time

Erin Harris (Literary Agent)

Erin Harris is an agent at the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency, where she has worked since 2008. Passionate about the art of storytelling, she is actively seeking submissions in the following categories: literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, noir, literary thrillers, middle grade, and YA. She represents, among others, Bryan Furuness, author of the forthcoming debut novel The Lost Episodes Of Revie Bryson (Dzanc), Rosalie Knecht, the English language translator of Cesar Aira’s The Seamstress And The Wind (New Directions), David Yezzi, executive editor of The New Criterion and author of the forthcoming biography Anthony Hecht: Poet and the Age (St. Martin’s Press), and Carla Power, a New York Times Magazine contributor and former Newsweek correspondent.

A graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at The New School, Erin was a student of Susan Cheever, Ann Hood, James Lasdun, and Sigrid Nunez. She received her BA in Literature from Trinity College (Hartford, CT) and was Presidential Fellow of the English Department.

Session 5L: Literary Idol

Ann Hood (Author)

Ann Hood is the author, most recently, of the best selling novels The Knitting Circle, and The Red Thread. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was chosen as one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and to NPR's The Storywith Dick Gordon. Her essays and short stories have won Best American Food Writing, Best American Spiritual Writing, and Pushcart Prizes. They have appeared in publications including Tin House, Glimmertrain, The Paris Review, Bon Appétit, Traveler, O, and many others

Session 2A: How To Be a Tough Editor of Your Own Work

Session 5A: How To Be A Tough Editor of Your Work

Michelle Hoover (Author): Michelle Hoover is a full-time instructor at Boston University and has published short stories and novel excerpts in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, StoryQuarterly and Confrontation. She has been the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell, a MacDowell Fellow, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in Best New American Voices. Her novel, The Quickening, was published by Other Press in June 2010. It has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and is a Finalist for the Indies Choice Debut of 2010. Learn more at www.michelle-hoover.com.
Session 4E: The Essentials of the Novel

Elise Howard (Editor): Elise Howard joined Algonquin Books as editor and publisher of books for young readers in November 2011. She plans to launch the first list in Spring 2013, eventually building the program to fifteen YA and middle-grade titles a year. Elise was previously senior VP and associate publisher at HarperCollins Children's Books, where she primarily provided editorial oversight for the HarperTeen and Harper imprint fiction-publishing programs. In her twelve years at Harper, Elise had also headed the division's paperback publishing program. In addition to her program management, list development, and acquisitions responsibilities, Elise also edited many books on the Harper list, among them titles by Avi, Lynne Reid Banks, Chris Lynch, Rachel Vail, and Neil Gaiman, including the Newbery Medal winner The Graveyard Book. Before joining Harper, Elise headed the Avon Books for Young Readers program. She started her publishing career as a book packager, creating and editing YA and adult fiction series and a handful of practical non-fiction titles for adult readers.
Session 4J: Industry Guide to Publishing: Young Adult

Katherine Howe (Author): Katherine Howe was born in Houston, Texas, and holds degrees in art history and philosophy from Columbia, and American and New England Studies from Boston University. She is the author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which debuted at #2 on The New York Times bestseller list, and which has been translated into 25 languages. This past year she hosted the Expedition Week special “Salem: Unmasking the Devil” on the National Geographic Channel, and taught a seminar on historical fiction at Cornell. Her next novel, a historical thriller set in Boston in the aftermath of the Titanic sinking, is titled The House of Velvet and Glass and will be released in the US on May 1, 2012. She lives in upstate New York, where she is at work on her next novel.
Session 4H: The Big Book of What Really Happened: Historical Fiction in Theory and Practice

Emi Ikkanda (Editor): A Californian and fourth generation Japanese-American; Emi graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in English and Art. Having studied abroad at the American University of Paris, she later earned her master’s in Literature at King’s College London. Before joining Henry Holt and Company in 2008, Emi was an associate editor at the Berkeley Fiction Review and worked at the University of California Press. While at Holt, she worked closely with colleagues and their award-winning and bestselling authors, including John Banville, Richard Price, Elaine Sciolino, Jill Abramson, Anand Giridharadas, Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn, Tony Horwitz, Jimmy Carter, Del Quentin Wilber, Bill McKibben, Joe Drape, and Stephen Kinzer. Emi pursues a range of fiction, and loves voice-driven narratives or stories that focus on a fascinating or unlikely relationship. She has a soft spot for 20th century narratives, particularly WWII narratives, ranging from lighthearted to noir. Emi’s other interests lie in multicultural stories and stories set abroad, especially if they focus on families.

An admirer of novels with surreal or folklore elements, Emi also pursues a range of narrative nonfiction projects (including memoir or reportage), and is always looking for writers who present an engaging mix of travelogue and history, and loves books that explore cultures and communities in an engaging way.
Session 2M: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Bret Anthony Johnston (Author): Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of internationally acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. Named a best book of the year by The Independent of London and The Irish Times, Corpus Christi has received numerous awards. Johnston’s work appears in magazines such as The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The Oxford American, and Tin House, and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best for 2003, 2004, and 2005. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the recipient of the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has written essays for Slate.com and is a regular contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under thirty-five. A skateboarder for almost twenty years, Johnston is currently the director of the Creative Writing Program at Harvard University.

Tayari Jones (Author): Tayari Jones is the author of three novels, including Silver Sparrow and Leaving Atlanta. A graduate of Spelman College and Arizona State University, she is an Associate Professor in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark University. Her work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts and The United States Artists Foundation. She is spending the 2011-12 academic year at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, researching her fourth novel.
Session 3F: Tales From The Kidscape: The Art of the Coming of Age Story

Keith Kahla (Editor): Keith Kahla is an Executive Editor at St. Martin's Press, where he's worked since 1988. Kahla has worked on a broad range of fiction over the years but he currently acquires primarily thrillers, crime/mystery, and historical fiction for both the St. Martin's Press and Minotaur Books imprint. Among the writers he's worked with recently are Nevada Barr, Joseph Finder, Charles Cumming, Lindsey Davis, Steven Saylor, Ben Coes, Gregg Hurwitz, Archer Mayor, S. J. Rozan, Qiu Xiaolong, and Keigo Higashino.

Jane Karker (Special Guest): Jane Karker is owner and president of Maine Authors Publishing & Cooperative. Jane has over 20 years of experience in the printing industry. She founded a first of its kind company- Maine Authors Publishing & Cooperative in 2009; a for-profit company with cooperative-style sales and marketing elements. This unique model looks and acts like a traditional publishing company (with a catalog and distribution service) but allows self-publishing authors to participate and publish affordably. Authors retain 100% of the rights and royalties from each book sold to Maine bookstores, shops, and LL Bean. It is truly self-publishing "all dressed up" with the editorial and distribution quality of traditional publishing. Jane usually teams up with one of her staff members (Colleen Conlan, publicist, Cheryl McKeary, book-marketing & media specialist, Dean Gyorgy, book-trailer film-maker, or Genie Dailey, editor) for a well-rounded presentation.
Option 7: A Cooperative Model of Self-Publishing: The Real Deal and How We Did It

Jessica Keener (Author): Jessica Keener’s fiction has been listed in The Pushcart Prize under “Outstanding Writers” and published in numerous literary reviews. Writing awards include a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist’s Grant Program, a Joan Jakobson Scholarship from Wesleyan Writers Conference, a Chekhov Prize for Excellence in Fiction by the editors of Wilderness House Literary Review, and second prize in Redbook magazine’s fiction contest. For more than a dozen years she’s also been a features writer for The Boston Globe, Design New England, O, the Oprah Magazine, and other national magazines. She has taught writing and literature at Brown University, University of Miami, and Boston University. Night Swim is her debut novel.
Option 10: The Perils of Fictionalizing Your Family

Crystal King (Author)

Crystal King is a freelance writer and Pushcart-nominated poet who is currently working on her first novel. She holds an MA in Critical & Creative Thinking from UMass Boston where she centered her thesis on developing a system to help fiction writers in progress. An 18 year marketing and communications veteran, Crystal currently drives social media for Keurig, Inc., the leading coffeemaker brand in the US. She has taught classes in writing, creativity and social media at Harvard Extension School, Boston University, Mass College of Art and UMass Boston. Find her on Twitter at @crystallyn and on Google+ at gplus.to/crystallyn.

Option 2: Social Media For Beginners

Session 6K: The Best Practices for Using Social Media: A Guide for Writers Already Online

Option 10: Social Media for Writers: A Guide for Writers Already Online

Paul S. Levine (Literary Agent)

Paul S. Levine ”wears two hats” – he is a lawyer and a literary agent. Mr. Levine has practiced entertainment law for over 29 years, specializing in the representation of writers, producers, actors, directors, composers, musicians, artists, authors, photographers, galleries, publishers, developers, production companies and theatre companies in the fields of motion pictures, television, interactive multimedia, live stage, recorded music, concerts, the visual arts, publishing, and advertising.

In 1998, Mr. Levine opened the Paul S. Levine Literary Agency, specializing in the representation of book authors and the sale of motion picture and television rights in and to books. Since starting his literary agency, Mr. Levine has sold over 80 fiction and non-fiction books to at least 30 different publishers and has had many books developed as movies-for-television and feature films. The fiction Mr. Levine represents tends to be commercial—thrillers, mysteries, women’s fiction, “soap opera” in the vein of Danielle Steele or Jackie Collins, and literary fiction. The non-fiction he represents also tends to be commercial—self-help, how-to, relationships, memoirs, health, women’s issues, pop culture, new age, and business. For fiction and non-fiction books, his biggest successes have been with authors who originally self-publish their books, then wish to have their books republished by a major publisher. For the film screen, he represents a wide range of scripts, from romantic comedies to thrillers to historical epics. In television, Mr. Levine mainly represents writers and producers of true life-story movies-for-television, as well as docudramas. He represents writers and writer-producers of network and non-network series television, both dramas and comedies, as well as reality shows, game shows, and talk shows.

Session 2M: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Option 2: The Legal and Business Aspects of Book Publishing

Elinor Lipman (Author)

Elinor Lipman is the author of 10 works of fiction, including The Family Man, My Latest Grievance, The Inn at Lake Devine, and Then She Found Me. She had been a judge for the National Book Awards and the National Endowment for the Arts, and holds the Elizabeth Drew Chair in Creative Writing at Smith College. Her next two books, The View From Penthouse B and a collection of personal essays, will be published in 2013.

Session 1J: Fall in Love with the First Page

Session 3K: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition

Margot Livesey (Author)

Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She has taught in numerous writing programs including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Boston University, and the Warren Wilson MFA program, and is the author of a collection of stories and six novels, including Eva Moves The Furniture and most recently The House On Fortune Street which won the LL Winship/PEN New England award. She lives in Cambridge and is a distinguished writer-in-residence at Emerson College in Boston. Her novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, was published early in 2012.

Session 6D: Hush, Shut Up, Please Be Quiet

National Book Prize Reading & Reception

Ned Lomigora (Panelist): Ned is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Zeeen.com. Ned is primarily focused on product development and ensuring great customer experience. Ned is passionate about creating innovative technologies that increase productivity for publishing in the age of digital media. Ned started Boston Publishing Innovators with the intent to foster innovation in publishing. He has held various executive and senior management roles across industries such as enterprise software, biotechnology, and advanced computing. While working on his thesis at MIT, Ned invented a concept later known as auto-id RFID. Ned is a former Olympic athlete. When he is not working on Zeeen, he spends time with his four year old daughter, enjoys raising money as Chair of Sponsorship for the MIT club of Boston, and practices Aikido.
Session 4L: The World Is Your Oyster: The Unprecedented Opportunities of the Digital Age

Lois Lowry (Author): Born in Hawaii, Lois Lowry has lived all over the world and now divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a 1768 farmhouse in Maine. Her list of fiction includes 40 books for young people. Twice the recipient of the Newbery Medal, Lowry has received countless other honors for her work. In recent years she has traveled extensively, speaking to children in Spain, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia about the importance of literature and imagination in their lives. She is a mother and grandmother and has worked as a photojournalist as well as a writer of fiction.
Session 3B: No, There Will Not Be A Sequel, She Lied

Steve Macone (Author): Steve Macone studied journalism at Boston University and is a contributor at The Onion. His essays, humor writing and reporting have also appeared in The American Scholar, Atlantic Online, The New Yorker, Boston Globe, Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Phoenix, Salon.com, The Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, The Drum, The Weekly Dig, and AOL News. He's been featured on NPR and had a story about playing with action figures named a "notable essay" in the Best American Essays series. His writing at times has been featured on The Daily Beast, Longreads.com, and The New Yorker site's "to read" section and at other times gone almost completely unread.
Option 9: Submitting Your Non-Fiction: A Strategic Plan

Thomas Mallon (Author): Thomas Mallon’s eight books of fiction include Henry And Clara, Bandbox, Fellow Travelers and the forthcoming Watergate: A Novel. He has also written volumes of nonfiction about plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book Of One's Own), letters (Yours Ever), and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine's Garage), as well as two books of essays (Rockets And Rodeos and In Fact). His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review and other publications. He received his PhD in English and American Literature from Harvard University and taught for a number of years at Vassar College. His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle award for reviewing, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style. He has been literary editor of Gentlemen's Quarterly and deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He currently directs the Creative Writing program at The George Washington University in Washington, DC.
Session 3H: Never Happened: An Historical Novelist Looks at Alternate-History Fiction

Erin Malone (Literary Agent): Erin Malone is a literary agent at WME Entertainment. She represents both fiction and non-fiction. In regards to fiction, she works primarily with commercial and historical novelists. In non-fiction she works mostly with humorists, journalists and pop-science, history and psychology authors. Her current list of book clients includes Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer, historical thriller writer Lyndsay Faye, journalist Rose George, Edgar-nominated and Anthony and Barry-award-winning mystery writer Bryan Gruley, Young Adult novelist Julia Hoban, New Yorker cartoonist and television writer/producer Bruce Eric Kaplan, New York Times bestselling author and television writer Christian Lander, David McRaney, co-founder of Reddit and founder of Breadpig Alexis Ohanian, #1 internationally bestselling author Neil Pasricha, comedienne Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp, and New York Times bestselling author Rainn Wilson (SoulPancake). Before joining the book department, Erin worked in film and television production and development in New York. A native of Poland, Ohio, she is a graduate of Denison University.
Session 2L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Non-Fiction

Amy Marcott (Author): Amy Marcott has published fiction in Necessary Fiction, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, Dogwood, Memorious, Juked, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Sewanee Writers' Conference scholarship and a Somerville Arts Council fellowship, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and won third place in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Contest, among other honors. She received a BA in English from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Penn State University, where she also taught creative writing and composition. She has been a professional writer and editor for many years and currently plies her trade at MIT, where she's an active blogger and social media marketer and assists with incorporating new technologies into online strategies. She belongs to the Writers' Room of Boston and is currently at work on a novel.
Option 5: Essentials of the Blog

Man Martin (Author): Man Martin is the author of two novels, Days of the Endless Corvette (Carroll and Graf, 2007) and Paradise Dogs (St Martin’s Press, 2011). Man’s work has appeared in McSweeney’s Online, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Pedestal, and The Alaska Quarterly Review. Before turning to writing, he wrote and drew the Syndicated Comic strip "Sibling Revelry,” for dozens of newspapers via Universal Press Syndicate. An alum of both the Kenyon Writers’ Workshop (teaching and attending) and Sewanee, Martin holds a PhD in Fiction Writing from Georgia State University.
Session 3D: Reading Like a Writer

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (Author): Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and other publications, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. In January she will begin teaching creative nonfiction at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, but will continue to teach and consult at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.
Session 1E: The Essentials of Voice

Stephen McCauley (Author): Stephen McCauley is the author of six novels, including The Object of My Affection, Alternatives to Sex, and, most recently, Insignificant Others. He has also published two novels under the name Rain Mitchell. Two of his novels have been made into feature films, and a third, based on The Easy Way Out, will be released in France next fall. Stephen has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Harper's, Vogue, and other publications, and is currently Associate Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University.
Session 4A: Would Your Book Make A Good Film? An Interview with Alessandro Nivola

Mameve Medwed (Author): Mameve Medwed (named for two grandmothers, Mamie and Eva) is the author of the novels, Mail, Host Family, The End of an Error, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, (2007 Massachusetts Honor award for Fiction) and Of Men and Their Mothers. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Gourmet, Yankee, Boston Globe, Missouri Review, Newsday and The Washington Post . Born in Bangor, Maine, she lives in Cambridge. She is at work on a sixth novel and a memoir of an editorial friendship.
Session 3K: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition

Randy Susan Meyers (Author): Randy Susan Meyers’ debut novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, was chosen as a “Must Read Novel” by the Massachusetts Book Awards, and named a best book pick by Elle France, Daily Candy, Goodreads, The Boston Herald, The Winnipeg Free Press, and Book Reporter. Her second novel, The Comfort of Lies, will release in January 2013. She is a founding member of Beyond The Margins writer’s blog, and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post. You can reach her at randysusanmeyers.com.
Session 5K: Promotion and Publicity

Seth Mnookin (Author): Seth Mnookin is a Lecturer in MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was called a "tour de force" by The New York Times and "a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing" by The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of the 2006 national bestseller Feeding the Monster, about the rise of the Boston Red Sox, and 2004's Hard News, which chronicled the leadership scandals at The New York Times and was a Washington Post “Best Book of the Year.” Since 2005, Seth has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has also written for New York, GQ, Wired, Slate, The New York Times, Newsweek, and many other publications. A native of Newton, Massachusetts, he and his wife currently live in Cambridge with their two children and their seven-year-old dog.
Session 5G: Write What You Don't (Yet) Know

Wendy Mnookin (Author): Wendy Mnookin's latest book of poetry is The Moon Makes Its Own Plea (BOA Editions, 2008.) The recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Wendy teaches poetry at Emerson College and at Grub Street. You can find out more about her writing at wendymnookin.com.
Session 5G: Write What You Don't (Yet) Know

Asya Muchnick (Editor): Asya Muchnick is an Executive Editor and has been at Little, Brown since 2001. She acquires literary and upmarket crime fiction, as well as narrative nonfiction, including history, biography, cultural history, and popular science. Among the authors she has worked with are Jo Ann Beard, Mark Childress, Michael Connelly, Zoë Ferraris, Janet Fitch, Pete Hamill, Alice Hoffman, Richard Lange, James E. McWilliams, Stephenie Meyer, Robert Mrazek, Carolyn Parkhurst, Sebastian Rotella, Alice Sebold, Åsne Seierstad, David Sedaris, Anita Shreve, and Peter Trachtenberg.
Session 3M: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Bharati Mukherjee (Author): Bharati Mukherjee is the author of eight novels, most recently Miss New India, Desirable Daughters, and The Tree Bride, two collections of stories, Darkness and The Middleman and other stories; and the co-author, with Clark Blaise, of two books of non-fiction Days and Nights in Calcutta, and The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy, and numerous essays on immigration and American culture. She is the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics' Circle award for best fiction. She has been professor of English at University of California-Berkeley since 1989.
Session 6B: The Author-Narrator Two-Step

Sabina Murray (Author): Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of the novels Forgery, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, and Slow Burn. Her short story collection The Caprices was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner award. Tales of the New World, a new story collection, looks at exploration in imaginative and fractured ways. Murray’s stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charilie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. She is a former Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and Guggenheim Fellow. She has received the Fred Brown Award from the University of Pittsburgh and, recently, was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. Murray is a regular contributor at The Nervous Breakdown. Currently, she teaches in the Creative Writing Program at UMass Amherst.
Session 1A: It's a Book: the Art of Collecting Short Stories into a Meaningful Volume

Richard Nash (Special Guest): Richard Nash is VP of Community and Content of Small Demons, founder of Cursor, and Publisher of Red Lemonade. He ran the iconic Soft Skull Press for which work he was awarded the Association of American Publishers' Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing in 2005. Books he published landed on bestseller lists from the Boston Globe to the Singapore Straits-Times; on the Best of the Year lists from The Guardian to the Toronto Globe & Mail to the Los Angeles Times; his final book was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Last year the Utne Reader named him one of Fifty Visionaries Changing Your World and Mashable.com picked him as the #1 Twitter User Changing the Shape of Publishing.
Keynote Address by Richard Nash

Shava Nerad (Author): Shava Nerad is a ghost writer, speech writer, and political/business/presentation coach living in Salem, Massachusetts. Her business involves working individually and often in total confidence with clients from PR agencies to high level executives to candidates for public office. Her contracts have included fiction, non-fiction, conference presentations, political and business speeches, press relations coaching, and more. Her background includes executive director of an international human rights NGO, chair of a mayoral campaign for a top 50 American city, and PR staff for city council in Cambridge, MA, as well as a key volunteer for Howard Dean in Oregon and online in 2003-2004. Laura "@Pistachio" Fitton referred to her and her partner as "the first couple of social media." Her much-cited defense of ghost blogging is available here. With a name that qualifies as a "unique identifier," her own writing is readily located in your favorite search engine. She finds that getting paid to write under others' names frees her to be controversial under her own.
Option 8: Ghostwriting: The Shadowy Path You Should Consider

Celeste Ng (Author): Celeste Ng graduated from Harvard University and earned her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Subtropics, The Kenyon Review Online, the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Hopwood Prize and a Pushcart Prize. She has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan and Grub Street, is a blogger for the Huffington Post, and is Blog Editor for the writing website Fiction Writers Review. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Session 6E: The Essentials of Point of View

Jennifer Niesslein (Magazine Editor): Jennifer Niesslein is the co-founder and co-editor of Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers and the author of Practically Perfect in Every Way (Putnam, 2007). Her work has been published in Salon, The Washington Post, The Nation, and broadcast on NPR's Morning Edition. Brain, Child has won several awards from Utne Independent Press Awards. Essays and stories published in Brain, Child have been honored by the Pushcart Press, Best American Essays, and Best American Short Stories.
Option 3: What Serves Our Needs At This Time

Alessandro Nivola (Special Guest)

Alessandro Nivola’s first professional leading role earned him a Drama Desk Award Nomination for his performance opposite Helen Mirren on Broadway in Turgenev’s A Month In The Country. The following year he drew critical acclaim and a Blockbuster Award Nomination for playing Nicolas Cage’s paranoid genius younger brother in John Woo’s Face/Off. A series of roles in English movies followed, establishing him as one of the few Americans capable of playing British characters from all regions and classes. He starred as a Hastings fisherman opposite Rachel Weisz in Michael Winterbottom’s I Want You, played Henry Crawford in the Patricia Rozema adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and a singing/dancing King Ferdinand of Navarre in Kenneth Brannagh’s musical film of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Back in the US he starred opposite Reese Witherspoon in Best Laid Plans, and played leading roles in Jurassic Park 3, and Mike Figgis’ Time Code. He returned to the theater to play Orlando to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Rosalind in As You Like It at Williamstown, before being reunited with Helen Mirren in Peter Jan Brugge’s film The Clearing, where he played Robert Redford’s son. He earned an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for his performance as the rock singer Ian McNight in Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon. Alessandro will next star opposite Elle Fanning and Annette Bening in Bomb, the new film from Sally Potter about the relationship between a radical anarchist (Nivola) and his daughter (Fanning) in early 1960s London. Alessandro received the Achievement in Acting Award from the Provincetown International Film Festival in 2010. The award was given for his collective work. He is a graduate of Yale University with a BA in English.

Session 3K: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition

Session 4A: Would Your Book Make A Good Film? An Interview with Alessandro Nivola

Randall Peffer (Author): Randall Peffer is the author of nine crime/romantic suspense novels and eight nonfiction books. His first book, Watermen, is a documentary of the lives of the Chesapeake's fishermen. It won the Baltimore Sun Critic's Choice Award and was Maryland Book of the Year. His novel Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues was a Lambda Award finalist and has been optioned for film. He is the author of over 300 travel-lifestyle features for magazines like National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Reader's Digest, Travel Holiday, Islands, and Sail. His travel features appear in most of the US major metro dailies. Randy’s Civil War naval thriller trilogy Southern Seahawk launched in November 2008. These historical novels feature the Confederate raider Raphael Semmes, the most successful naval predator in history. Screams & Whispers (August 2011) is the sixth novel in Randy’s Cape Islands Mystery series. Like the other books in the series, this novel features police, lawyers and commercial fishermen from Massachusetts’ south coast, Cape Cod, and the islands. Randy teaches writing and literature at Phillips Academy, Andover.
Session 3G: Death, Sex &Schnauzers: Writing Romantic Suspense

Mitali Perkins (Author): Mitali Perkins (mitaliperkins.com) knows and writes about growing up on the margins. Her award-winning books for young readers include Bamboo People, Monsoon Summer, Rickshaw Girl, Secret Keeper, and the First Daughter books. Mitali speaks frequently about the transforming power of stories as windows and mirrors, blogs about “books between cultures” (mitaliblog.com), tweets regularly (@mitaliperkins), and also connects with readers through Facebook. She's a firm believer in the power of social media to get stories into the hands and hearts of readers.
Session 2H: Straight Talk on Writing Race in Fiction

Tom Perrotta (Author): Tom Perrotta is the author of seven books, including The Leftovers, The Abstinence Teacher, Joe College, Bad Haircut, and the The Wishbones. His novels, Election and Little Children, were turned into acclaimed movies, and Perrotta was nominated for an Academy Award, along with director Todd Field, for their screenplay for Little Children. Perrotta's work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, GQ, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Best American Short Stories 2005. He lives with his family outside of Boston.
Session 1F: Stump the Author: A Q&A with Tom Perrotta

Eileen Pollack (Author)

Eileen Pollack is the author, most recently, of Breaking and Entering, a novel published in January 2012 by Four Way Books. Her collection In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas (Four Way, 2008), was named the winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, shortlisted for the Sophie Brody Medal for Jewish literature, chosen as a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Award, and awarded a silver medal in ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Competition. Her earlier books of fiction include a novel, Paradise, New York (Temple University Press), and a collection of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic (Delphinium). She is the author of Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull (University of New Mexico Press, 2001), and two textbook/anthologies, Creative Nonfiction: A Guide to Form, Content, and Style (Cengage, 2008), and (with Jeremy Chamberlin and Natalie Bakopoulos) the forthcoming Creative Composition (Cengage). She lives in Ann Arbor and teaches on the faculty of the MFA Program at the University of Michigan.

Session 3A: She's Gotta Have It: Why Desire Is a Writer's Best Friend

National Book Prize Reading and Reception

Jesse Potash (Panelist): Jesse Potash is the founder of PUBSLUSH Press www.pubslush.com-- a social, full service publisher that lets readers decide what books get published, and for every book sold donates a book to a child in need. Jesse hails from a financial services background but has worked additionally across a wide array of industries including publishing, fashion, and advertising. Jesse also serves on the board of directors for the PUBSLUSH Foundation, which is committed to supporting children’s literacy initiatives worldwide. He is a native New Yorker, yogi, boxer, and avid traveler.
Session 3L: You're the Boss: The Writer As Entrepreneur

Henriette Lazaridis Power (Author): Henriette Lazaridis Power's fiction and essays have appeared in Salamander, The New England Review, The Millions, The New York Times online, and Camera Obscura, among others. She is the founding editor of The Drum, an online literary magazine publishing short fiction and essays exclusively in audio form. With WBUR's Radio Boston, she created and runs the Zip-Code Stories storytelling project. In partnership with the Boston Book Festival, The Drum sponsors the new literary series Lounge Lit. Her first novel will be published in 2013 by Ballantine Books.
Session 6J: How to Perform Your Work Like A Pro

Nahid Rachlin (Author): Nahid Rachlin attended the Columbia University MFA program on a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship and then went on to the Stanford University MFA program on a Stegner Fellowship. Her publications include a memoir, Persian Girls (Penguin), four novels, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married To A Stranger (E.P.Dutton), and The Heart's Desire (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, Veils (City Lights). Her individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook, and Shenandoah. One of her stories was adapted by Selected Shorts at Symphony Space and read by the actress Freda Foh Shen at the Getty Center of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and was aired around the country on NPR. Her work has received favorable reviews in major magazines and newspapers and has been translated into Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, and Farsi. She has written reviews and essays for The New York Times, Newsday, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. Her other grants and awards include the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She has been interviewed in magazines such as Poets & Writers and AWP Writers Chronicle. Currently she teaches advanced fiction at The New School. For more, visit her website: www.NahidRachlin.com.
Session 1G: The Art of Memoir Writing

Ladette Randolph (Magazine Editor): Ladette Randolph is editor-in-chief of Ploughshares and the author of three books of fiction, two novels Haven’s Wake (forthcoming in spring 2013) and the award winning A Sandhills Ballad, and the short story collection This Is Not the Tropics. In addition, she is the editor of two anthologies: A Different Plain and The Big Empty. Dr. Randolph is on the faculty of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing department at Emerson College in Boston. Prior to joining the staff at Ploughshares, she was an acquiring editor and associate director at University of Nebraska Press. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe grant, the Virginia Faulkner Award, a Best New American Voices citation, and four Nebraska Book Awards.

Janet Reid (Literary Agent): Janet Reid specializes in compelling fiction, particularly crime fiction, and narrative non-fiction. She's always on the lookout for fabulous projects. Her publishing background includes 15 years in book publicity with clients both famous and infamous. She is actively looking for projects that show mastery of craft and originality. Recent sales include Faithful Unto Death by Stephanie Evans (Berkley), Unraveling by Liz Norris (Harper), Purgatory Chasm by Steve Ulfelder (Minotaur); The Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell (Soho). She belongs to the agents professional association AAR. She's an associate member of Mystery Writers of America and International Thriller Writers. She belongs to the American Library Association, Biographer's International Organization, the American History Association and is a past board member of the NYC chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. She keeps a blog with information about clients, answering questions about publishing and query letters, and other things that strike her interest at Janet Reid Literary and a blog critiquing query letters at Query Shark.
Session 1K: What Agents Want

Diana Renn (Author): Diana Renn’s debut young adult novel, Tokyo Heist, will be published by Viking/Penguin on June 14. Her essays and short fiction have been published in a variety of magazines. She lives outside of Boston with her husband and son, and is working on her next novel. Visit her website and her group blog about mystery writing for kids and teens, Sleuths Spies & Alibis.
Option 11: Out of the Slush Pile and Into Print in YA/MG Publishing

Hillary Rettig (Author): Hillary Rettig is an author, workshop leader and coach who specializes in helping people overcome procrastination and use their time better. Her latest book is The Seven Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism and Writer's Block (Infinite Art, 2011). Of her prior book, The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way (Lantern Books, 2006), the leading liberal blog, DailyKos.com, said, "If I had but one book to spend hard-earned cash on this year, The Lifelong Activist would be it, hands down." Hillary is a Bronx native who currently enjoys living in East Boston. She has published numerous nonfiction articles, and also short fiction. Some of the acclaimed science fiction writers she has studied with are Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delaney and the late Octavia Butler. Hillary is also a kidney donor, foster parent, lover of dogs and other animals, and vegan. Download free ebooks and other information on productivity and related fields at www.hillaryrettig.com, and Hillary welcomes your emails at hillaryrettig@yahoo.com.
Session 5M: Indie Publishing: A Primer

Alan Rinzler (Editor): Alan Rinzler has edited and published Toni Morrison, Tom Robbins, Hunter S. Thompson, Clive Cussler, Andy Warhol, Robert Ludlum, Jerzy Kosinski, Bob Dylan, Shirley MacLaine and others while holding senior positions at Simon and Schuster Bantam Books, Rolling Stone's Straight Arrow Books, the Grove Press, and elsewhere. Working with writers has been his privilege and passion since 1962. He retired as Executive Editor of John Wiley in 2010, and is now an independent consultant and developmental editor, with primarily writers of literary fiction, YA, Mysteries, SciFi, and memoirs.
Session 3M: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Taryn Roeder (Author)

Taryn Roeder has worked in book publicity for 15 years and currently is the Assistant Director of Publicity at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bestselling authors she's worked with include Jonah Lehrer, the late Anthony Shadid, Peter Schweizer, Justin Torres, and Temple Grandin. Taryn previously served as the Publicity Manager at Island Press, and has worked at Warner Books, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Boston Book Review. Taryn has a BA in English (Creative Writing) from Barnard College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) from the University of Maryland College Park.

Session 5K: Promotion and Publicity

Jane Roper (Author): Jane Roper is the author of Double Time (St. Martin's Press, 2012), a memoir of parenting twins and dealing with clinical depression, and a novel, Eden lake(Last Light Studio, 2011). She writes the Baby Squared blog on Babble.com, and her writing has appeared in Salon, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus and elsewhere. Jane received her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has been involved with Grub Street since 2000, first as a student and later as an instructor—and she is extremely proud to have come up with the name "The Muse and the Marketplace." Jane lives in the Boston area with her husband and twin daughters, and works as a freelance advertising copywriter.
Session 6G: From Memories to Moments: Structure and Scene for Memoir

Leonard Rosen (Author): Leonard Rosen is a best-selling, non-fiction writer among educational publishers. His radio commentaries have aired on NPR and he has taught writing at Harvard University. His debut thriller, All Cry Chaos, published in September 2011 to strong reviews, with Mystery Scene calling it “easily one of the best first novels of the last couple of years.”
Session 4F: Where Do You Find Your Thrills (as a Writer?)

Trish Ryan (Author): Trish Ryan is the author of He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: A Memoir Of Finding Faith, Hope, And Happily Ever After (Hachette 2008), and A Maze Of Grace: A Memoir Of Second Chances (Hachette 2010). She loves to help other writers navigate the complicated terrain of personal storytelling. She lives outside of Boston with her husband Steve. Visit her at www.trishryanonline.com.
Session 3J: Memoir: Creating Your Characters

Hank Phillippi Ryan (Author)

Hank Phillippi Ryan is the investigative reporter for Boston's NBC affiliate. A television journalist since 1975, she has won 27 Emmys and ten Edward R. Murrow awards for her work. A best-selling author of four mystery novels, Ryan has won the Agatha, Anthony and Macavity awards for her crime fiction. She’s on the national board of directors of Mystery Writers of America (and an instructor at MWA-U) and vice president of National Sisters in Crime. Her newest suspense thriller, The Other Woman, is the first in a new series beginning in 2012 from Forge Books. Her website is www.HankPhillippiRyan.com.

Session 5C: The Scoop: Using Television Techniques to Write A Killer Novel

Option 12: Guided Open Mic

Katharine Sands (Literary Agent): A literary agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency, Katharine Sands has worked with a varied list of fiction and non-fiction authors who publish a diverse array of books. Highlights include Dating the Devil (producer: Vast Entertainment) by Lia Romeo; XTC: SongStories; Chasing Zebras: The Unofficial Guide to House, MD; Make Up, Don't Break Up with Oprah guest Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil; Playwright Robert Patrick's novel, Temple Slave; The Complete Book on International Adoption: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Your Child; Hands Off My Belly: The Pregnant Woman's Survival Guide to Myths, Mothers, and Moods; Under the Hula Moon; Whipped: A Professional Dominatrix's Secrets for Wrapping Men Around Your Little Finger; The Gay Vacation Guide; CityTripping: a Guide for Foodies, Fashionistas and the Generally Syle-Obsessed; Writers on Directors; How to Create an Identity for a Brilliant Career, Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Annulled, Beheaded, Survived: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Ford model Helen Lee's The Tao of Beauty; Elvis and You: Your Guide to the Pleasures of Being an Elvis Fan; New York: Songs of the City; Taxpertise: Dirty Little Secrets the IRS Doesn't Want You to Know; The SAT Word Slam; Divorce After 50; The Complete Book of Bone Health; and The Safe and Sane Guide to Teenage Plastic Surgery, to name a few. She is the agent provocateur of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent's Eye, a collection of pitching wisdom from leading literary agents. Actively building her client list, she likes books that have a clear benefit for readers' lives in categories of food, travel, lifestyle, home arts, beauty, wisdom, relationships, parenting, and fresh looks, which might be at issues, life challenges or popular culture. When reading fiction she wants to be compelled and propelled by urgent storytelling, and hooked by characters. For memoir and femoir, she likes to be transported to a world rarely or newly observed.
Session 5L: Literary Idol

Whitney Scharer (Special Guest)

Whitney Scharer is the Development and Communications Director of Grub Street, where she has been on staff since 2004. She received her BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and her MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington, where she was the recipient of the Loren D. Milliman fellowship for her second year of study. She holds a Certificate in Professional Fundraising from Boston University. Her short fiction has appeared in the Cimarron Review, Mare Nostrum, and the Bellevue Literary Review, and was awarded the Horgan Prize for Short Fiction. Whitney grew up in Colorado and now makes her home in Somerville, though she occasionally yearns to be back in the Mile High City. When she's not blogging about her daughter, Lydia, at The Crib Sheet, she can be found at work on her first novel.

Saturday Hour of Power, Option 13: Don’t Get the Post-Muse Blues: How to Stay Connected and Keep Writing All Year Long

Sunday Hour of Power, Option 13: Don’t Get the Post-Muse Blues: How to Stay Connected and Keep Writing All Year Long

Adam Schear (Literary Agent): Adam Schear is a graduate of Tulane University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He began his publishing career at the William Morris Agency and joined DeFiore and Company in 2009. He is interested in literary fiction and well-crafted commercial fiction, work that captivates the reader with its prose and its plot, humor, YA, smart thrillers, historical fiction, and quirky debut literary novels. For non-fiction he is interested in memoirs, politics, science, popular culture, and current events.
Session 3M: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Britton Schey (Literary Agent): Britton Schey started her career in publishing almost four years ago at WME Entertainment. She is looking for commercial literary fiction, particularly anything with an international slant or explorations of the class systems. She also loves magical realism as a device and is on the search for her own Rabih Alameddine, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago, or Salman Rushdie. She also works with several clients in lifestyle space at WME and is open to looking at projects related to food, the history various aspects of culture, and health. Before coming to WME, Britton worked at CNN. She is a graduate of New York University and grew up in Birmingham, Michigan.

Rebecca Joines Schinsky (Special Guest): Rebecca writes about books, the reading life, and the publishing industry at her popular literary site The Book Lady's Blog. She is a freelance writer, critic, and social media strategist and works as an editor at Book Riot. When not reading books and writing about them, she can be found on the Bookrageous podcast and the board of James River Writers in her adopted hometown Richmond, VA.

Katrin Schumann (Author)

Katrin Schumann is the co-author of The Secret Power of Middle Children and Mothers Need Time-Outs, Too. She has been featured on the TODAY show, Talk of the Nation and in The Times, as well as other newspapers, magazines and radio, nationally and internationally. Schumann’s latest projects include a historical novel set in the Baltic, various non-fiction books in development, and on-going editorial work for editors, agents and writers. For the past ten years she has been teaching fiction and non-fiction, most recently at a local women’s prison, and running parenting focus groups and surveys. Before going freelance, she helped produce talk shows at NPR, where she won the Kogan Media Award. Schumann has been granted writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Norman Mailer Writer's Colony. Awarded scholarships to Oxford and Stanford Universities, she studied literature, language and journalism. Schumann was born in Freiburg, Germany, grew up in New York City and London, and now lives in Massachusetts.

Session 3M: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Session 6M: Writing a Killer Non-Fiction Book Proposal

James Scott (Author): James Scott earned his MFA from Emerson College and his BA from Middlebury College. His fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Post Road, One Story, American Short Fiction, and Memorious among others, anthologized by flatmancrooked, and nominated for the Best New American Voices Anthology and the Pushcart Prize. He has received awards from Yaddo, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the St. Botolph's Club, the Tin House Writers' Conference, the New York State Summer Writers' Institute, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. James has worked for various production companies and publications, Bob Vila productions, and the Boston Red Sox. A former fiction editor of Redivider, he currently works for One Story and the magazine Under the Radar. Learn more at www.jamesscottwriter.com.
Option 11: A Grubbie Guide to Conferences and Residencies

Elizabeth Searle (Author): Elizabeth Searle is the author of four books of fiction, most recently Girl Held In Home (2011), and the librettist of Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera, a show that has drawn national media attention. Her previous books are: Celebrities In Disgrace, a novella that was produced as a short film in 2010; A Four-Sided Bed, a novel recently re-released in paperback and in development as a feature film and My Body To You, a story collection that won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Elizabeth's theater works have been featured in stories on Good Morning America, CBS, CNN, NPR, The Associated Press, and more. Her show Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera has been produced on both coasts, most recently in Boston in 2011. Elizabeth has published over 30 stories in magazines such as Redbook, Ploughshares, and Kenyon Review and in anthologies such as Don't You Forget About Me (Simon & Schuster). The film Celebrities in Disgrace, with script by Elizabeth, has screened at film festivals around the country. Elizabeth is featured in many anthologies, including Men Undressed: Women Writers On Male Sexual Experience (2011). Elizabeth teaches fiction, pop-fiction and scriptwriting at Stonecoast MFA.
Session 6C: Reality Fiction: Using Ripped-From-The-Headlines News Stories, Celebrity Sagas, and Your Own True Confessions to Make Your Fiction "Pop"

Michelle Seaton (Author)

Michelle Seaton has been an instructor with Grub Street since 2000, teaching such classes as 6 Weeks-6 Essays, Tour of the Essay, and Master Narrative Nonfiction. She is also the lead instructor and created the curriculum for Grub Street's Memoir Project, a program that offers free memoir classes to senior citizens in Boston neighborhoods. The project has visited ten Boston neighborhoods and produced three anthologies. Twenty-two participants on Nantucket have also completed a Memoir Project class, and that anthology is forthcoming. Seaton’s nonfiction work has been published in Bostonia, Yankee, Robb Report and The Pinch. Her essay, “How to Work a Locker Room” appeared in the 2009 edition of Best American Nonrequired Reading. It is based on her experience covering the National Hockey League for National Public Radio's Only a Game, a program for which she has been a frequent contributor for 14 years. For the show, she has reported on topics ranging from asthma camp to professional wrestling to bird watching. Her fiction has appeared in the Sycamore Review and Quiddity International Journal. She is the coauthor of The Way of Boys (William Morrow, 2009). Her other book projects include The Cardiac Recovery Handbook, coauthored with Dr. Paul Kligfield, Medical Director of Cardiology at the Weill-Cornell Medical Center of the New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Session 3E: Essentials of Style

National Book Prize Reading & Reception

Jacqueline Sheehan (Author): Jacqueline Sheehan, PhD, is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent 20 years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, roofing, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers. Her first novel, Truth, was published in 2003 by Free Press of Simon and Schuster. Her second novel, Lost and Found, was published in 2007 by Avon, Harper Collins. Lost and Found is already in its 6th printing. She has published travel articles (Winter in Soviet Georgia), short stories (most recently in the Berkshire Review), and numerous essays and radio pieces. In 2005, she was the editor of the anthology Women Writing in Prison. This anthology is the culmination of eight years of writing workshops sponsored by Voices From Inside, an advocacy group for incarcerated women. She is currently the fiction editor for Patchwork Journal, an online journal sponsored by Patchwork Farm, and she is part of the faculty at Writers in Progress in Florence, MA. She maintains a small psychology practice in Western Massachusetts. Jacqueline teaches workshops on writing and the combination of yoga and writing.
Option 8: The Psychology of Character

Anita Shreve (Author): In 1989, Anita Shreve published her first novel, Eden Close. Since then she has written 15 other novels, among them The Weight of Water, The Pilot's Wife, The Last Time They Met, A Wedding in December, Testimony, A Change in Altitude and, most recently, Rescue. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine and dozens of others. Shreve has received the PEN/L. L. Winship Award and the New England Book Award for fiction. Oprah Winfrey selected The Pilot's Wife for her Book Club, and it became an international bestseller.
Session 3K: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition

Leora Skolkin-Smith (Author): Leora Skolkin-Smith was born in Manhattan in 1952, and spent her childhood between Pound Ridge, New York, and Israel, traveling with her family to her mother’s birthplace in Jerusalem every three years. She earned her BA and MFA and was awarded a teaching fellowship for graduate work, all at Sarah Lawrence. Skolkin-Smith’s first published novel, Edges was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley's own imprint at Glad Day books. Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award by Grace Paley. The Fragile Mistress, a feature film based on Edges, is currently in pre-production, scheduled to begin shooting on location in Jerusalem, Jordan, and New York, produced by Triboro Pictures, directed by Michael Gunther - thefragilemistress.com. Excerpts from Hysteria were first published by Persea Books, and recently appeared in The Hamilton Stone Review. Recent publications include a piece from The Fragile Mistress, which appeared in Guernica Magazine in 2010. Leora was recently a panelist, at The Haitian Cultural International Book Festival, The Miami International Book Fair, The Virginia Festival of the Book, and The National Women’s Association. She is currently a contributing editor to ReadySteadyBook.com and her critical essays have been published in The Washington Post, The National Book Critics Circle’s Critical Mass, Conversational Reading, The Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
Option 10: The Perils of Fictionalizing Your Family

Sarah Smith (Author): Sarah Smith has been interested in ghosts and storytelling since she was four. The Other Side of Dark, her first YA, is inspired by an unsolved Boston mystery, her multicultural relatives, and her love of ghost stories. It won the Agatha Award for best YA mystery of the year and the Massachusetts Book Award for best YA book of the year. She studied English at Harvard (where she spent Saturdays hiding out in the library reading mysteries) and film in London. She is the bestselling author of an adult mystery series set in Edwardian Boston and Paris; two of the books have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year, one was a London Times Book of the Year, and The Vanished Child, the first book in the series, is being made into a musical. She has also written a novel about the Shakespeare authorship, Chasing Shakespeares, and actually discovered a “Shakespearean” poem by another candidate. Chasing Shakespeares is being made into a play (is there is a trend here?) and the poem, "A New Shakespearean Poem," has recently been published for eReaders. She is working on a novel about the Titanic.
Option 4: Raising the Stakes of Your YA Characters

Kevin Smokler (Special Guest)

Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: Rereading Your Favorite Books From High School English (Prometheus Books, 2013). He speaks at writers' conferences and publishing events throughout North America and has written about writing, publishing and the future of the book for the Los Angeles Times, Fast Company, The San Francisco Chronicle and NPR. He has 60,000 twitter followers, 1 wife, 1 cat, and lives in San Francisco.

Session 1L: Promote My Book? Promote Myself? Help!

Session 5K: Promotion and Publicity

Debra Spark (Author): Debra Spark is the author of four books of fiction, including most recently The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception, and the novel Good for the Jews. She is also the author of Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing and editor of the anthology Twenty Under Thirty. Spark’s work has appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a NEA fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.
Session 2F: And Then What Happened

Peter Spiegelman (Author): Peter Spiegelman is the Shamus Award-winning author of four novels, including Thick As Thieves as well as Black Maps, Death’s Little Helpers, and Red Cat, which feature private investigator and Wall Street refugee John March. Prior to embarking on a career as a writer, Peter spent over 20 years in the financial services and software industries, and worked with leading banks, brokerages, and central banks around the world. He retired from the software industry in 2001. His debut novel, Black Maps, was published by Knopf in August 2003. Peter’s short fiction has appeared in many collections, including Dublin Noir, Hardboiled Brooklyn, The Darker Mask, and Wall Street Noir, a crime fiction anthology that he also edited. Peter was born in New York City and, aside from a brief stint in Los Angeles, grew up in the New York metropolitan area. He is a graduate of Vassar College, where he majored in English. He lives with his family in Connecticut.
Session 1H: No Other Place: Setting and the Crime Novel

Jamison Stoltz (Editor): Jamison Stoltz is a senior editor at Grove/Atlantic. He edits nonfiction – recent titles include Rez Life by David Treuer, Paradise Lust by Brook Wilensky-Lanford, and Harlem by Jonathan Gill – and mysteries and thrillers, including Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti series and the novels of Deon Meyer, Mike Lawson, and Mark Haskell Smith. Other notable books he has edited include The American Home Front by Alistair Cooke, Mint Condition by Dave Jamieson, The Fighter’s Heart by Sam Sheridan, and the original publication of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Before joining Grove/Atlantic, he worked at the William Morris Agency in London and New York, and in publicity at Houghton Mifflin in New York.

Anne Stuart (Author): Anne Stuart has more than 30 years of experience as a writer and editor for daily newspapers, national magazines, an international news service, and numerous online publications. She’s also been a full-time freelance writer and a part-time college professor. Currently, she's the editor of a business-to-business website, where she considers pitches from and assigns articles to many freelance journalists. Previously, she held senior writing and editing positions at Inc., CIO, Harvard and WebMaster magazines, among others. Earlier in her career, she was a reporter for three daily newspapers and the Associated Press. Anne's work has appeared in American Way (American Airlines in-flight mag), Boston Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Chicago Tribune, CFO, Deliver, Fodor's Travel Guides, Newsday, Northeastern Magazine, and many others. She has also contributed to many other consumer and business publications both in print and online. Her work has won numerous awards. Anne is an adjunct professor of communication at Lasell College in Newton, Massachusetts, and has also taught journalism at Emerson College and Northeastern University in Boston. She’s led more than 100 writing and editing workshops at conferences, adult-education centers and other venues, including many on interviewing techniques. She's currently at work on a book about interviewing people for publication. She received a double bachelor’s degree in English and journalism from Michigan State University and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University.
Option 6: Talk to Me: Interviewing People for Publication

Sebastian Stuart (Author): Sebastian Stuart has written novels, plays, screenplays and has ghostwritten in every genre imaginable. As a playwright, he was dubbed “the poet laureate of the Lower East Side” by Michael Musto in the Village Voice. His first novel, The Mentor, was a psychological thriller. 24-Karat Kids, written with Dr. Judy Goldstein, was published in eight countries. Charm! by Kendall Hart was a New York Times bestselling tie-in with the soap opera "All My Children." The Hour Between was a National Public Radio Season’s Reading pick and won the Ferro-Grumley Award as best LGBT novel of 2009. To the Manor Dead, the first in a mystery series set in the Hudson Valley, was published in 2010; the second book in the series, Dead by Any Other Name, came out in October 2011.
Session 3K: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition

Rosie Sultan (Author): Rosie Sultan is the author of the historical novel Helen Keller In Love (Viking 2012). She won the PEN Discovery Award for fiction, and was a fellow at The Virginia Center for the Arts. Her interest in Helen Keller began when she was ten. She ordered a thin paperback biography of Helen and read it in her room; she has read every book about Helen Keller since then. Rosie earned her MFA at Goddard College and has taught writing at Boston University, The University of Massachusetts, and Grub Street. She currently teaches at Suffolk University in Boston. She lives with her son and husband in Brookline, Mass.
Session 5D: Characters Talk, Centuries Talk: How to Write Historical Fiction

Rachel Sussman (Literary Agent): A graduate of Brown University, Rachel Sussman began her publishing career in the editorial department of Scribner, where she edited literary fiction and memoir. After six years as an agent with the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency in New York, she co-founded Chalberg & Sussman in 2011. Rachel represents authors of serious nonfiction, unserious nonfiction, and literary fiction. Her clients include Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, Director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Virtually You; Caroline Bock, author of the YA novel Lie; Lex Friedman, co-author of The Snuggie Sutra; Tiffany Hawk, author of the forthcoming novel Love Me Anyway; Hal Herzog, professor of psychology at Western Carolina University and author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat; the historian and archaeologist Philip Levy, author of a forthcoming biography of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s childhood home; Matt Logelin, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Two Kisses for Maddy; and YoungHouseLove.com founders Sherry and John Petersik, authors of the forthcoming home makeover guide Spruce.
Session 2L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Non-Fiction

Alice Tasman (Literary Agent): Alice Tasman has been a literary agent at the Jean V. Naggar Agency since 1995. Her list comprises award winning writers, both literary and commercial. She is committed to working with authors over the long term and is very hands on in every stage of the publishing process – from editing manuscripts and refining proposals, to amassing the perfect list of editors for the project and negotiating contracts, to actively working with publishers on the publicity and marketing of the books. She is interested in literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, memoir, young adult – and especially loves working with debut writers. Her clients include: Maud Casey, Elizabeth Crane, Gina Frangello, Ellen Potter, Timothy Schaffert, and Stephen Wetta among others. She earned her BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Christina Thompson (Magazine Editor): Christina Thompson is editor of Harvard Review and the author of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, a memoir of her years in the South Pacific. A recipient of grants from the NEA, NEH, and Australia Council, she writes regularly for The Boston Globe. Her essays have appeared in Vogue, American Scholar, New Zealand Geographic, and other publications. She teaches in the writing program at Harvard University Extension.

*IS AVAILABLE FOR SATURDAY APPOINTMENTS ONLY.*

Susan Tiberghien (Author): Susan Tiberghien, an American-born writer living in Switzerland, has published four memoirs, Looking for Gold, Circling to the Center, and Footsteps, A European Journal, and most recently One Year to A Writing Life, along with numerous narrative essays in journals and anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. She teaches and lectures at graduate programs, at C.G. Jung Centers, at the International Women’s Writing Guild events, and at writers’ centers and conferences both in the United States and in Europe. She teaches creative writing each month in Geneva, where she directs the Geneva Writers’ Group and Conferences. Her website is www.susantiberghien.com.
Session 2D: Memoir and Metaphor

Michelle Toth (Author): Michelle Toth is the author of Annie Begins, an Amazon.com bestselling novel and the first title from (sixoneseven) books, an independent publishing cooperative that she founded in 2010. Additional titles from (sixoneseven) books include Veronica’s Nap by Sharon Bially, Twelve Weeks by Karen Lee Sobol, and The Bookie’s Son by Andrew Goldstein (forthcoming in May 2012). A graduate of Harvard Business School, Michelle has a longstanding interest in understanding how technology disrupts traditional business models, and has more than 15 years of related experience. She’s worked as a researcher in e-commerce at Harvard, as an internet entrepreneur, and as part of Marketspace, the digital strategy unit of Monitor Group. She is currently the head of human capital for a leading investment management and technology development firm in New York City. Michelle is a long-time member of the board of directors of Grub Street, and divides her time between NYC and Boston.
Session 1M: Successful Self-Publishing

Becky Tuch (Author): Becky Tuch is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website dedicated to reviews of literary magazines and interviews with journal editors. Her fiction has received awards from The Somerville Arts Council, Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in Eclipse, Folio, HTMLGiant, Night Train, Quarter After Eight, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog Beyond the Margins.
Option 9: Literary Magazines: The Essentials of Submission

Jerald Walker (Author): Jerald Walker is the author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, recipient of the 2011 PEN New England/L.L. Winship Award for Nonfiction and named a Best Memoir of the Year by Kirkus Reviews. His essays have appeared in periodicals such as the Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, Mother Jones, The Iowa Review, and The Oxford American, as well as in numerous anthologies, including twice in The Best African American Essays and three times in The Best American Essays. Walker is an Associate Professor of creative writing at Emerson College, where he is Interim Chair and Co-Director of the Boston Summer Writing Conference.
Session 2G: The Suspension of Belief: On Being a Practitioner & Teacher of the Essay in the Age of Skepticism

Mitchell Waters (Literary Agent): Mitchell Waters has been an agent at Curtis Brown, Ltd. for seventeen years. He represents an eclectic group of authors of fiction and non-fiction. Recent and forthcoming titles include Evenfall by Liz Michalski, Sweet Like Sugar by Wayne Hoffman, The Man Who Couldn't Eat by Jon Reiner, You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis, Jane Austen Made Me Do It by Laurel Ann Nattress, Hell Or High Water by Joy Castro, The Great American Railroad War by Dennis Drabelle and Cloudland by Joseph Olshan.
Session 2L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Non-Fiction

Bruce Watson (Author): While becoming a writer, Bruce Watson worked as a factory hand, a journalist, a bartender, an office temp, a Peace Corps volunteer, and an elementary school teacher. His books include Freedom Summer, Sacco and Venzetti, Bread and Roses, and The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made. As a frequent contributor to Smithsonian, Watson wrote more than 40 feature articles on articles ranging from eels to Ferraris to the history of Coney Island. His articles have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, American Heritage, Yankee, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2003.
Option 6: Telling True Stories

Josh Weil (Author)

Josh Weil is the author of The New Valley (Grove/Atlantic 2009), a collection of three novellas that won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters; the New Writers Award from the GLCA; and a “5 Under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation. A New York Times Editors Choice, it was also shortlisted for the Library of Virginia’s literary award in fiction. Weil’s other fiction has appeared in such publications as Granta, One Story and Agni, and he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Oxford American, and Poets & Writers. The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, the Dana Foundation, the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, the James Merrill House, and the MacDowell Colony, he has taught at Bowling Green State University as the Distinguished Visiting Writer and been the Tickner Writer-in-Residence at Gilman School. He currently teaches at the University of Mississippi, where he is the 2011 Grisham Writer-in-Residence.

Session 1B: The Organic Outline

Session 5F: Loving Your Characters

Jay Wexler (Author): Jay Wexler is a professor of law at Boston University, where he has taught constitutional law and church/state law since 2001. He is the author of two books, Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars, and The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions, both published by Beacon Press. His first book of fiction, The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, and Other Stories, will be published by QuidPro Press later in 2012. In addition to many scholarly articles, Wexler has published nearly fifty short stories, humor pieces, essays, and reviews in places like The Boston Globe, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Mental Floss, Monkeybicycle, Opium, and Spy. His website is JayWex.com.
Option 7: Spicing Up Your Non-Fiction with Non-Prose Elements

Paul Whitlatch (Editor): Paul Whitlatch, editor at Scribner, has edited books by David Goodwillie (American Subversive, a New York Times Notable Book of 2010), Daniel Hernandez (Down & Delirious in Mexico City), and David Whitehouse (Bed, a finalist for the Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction Award). His forthcoming books include the thriller The Last Good Man by A. J. Kazinski; Talking Back to Facebook by Common Sense Media CEO Jim Steyer, Tim Crothers's The Queen of Katwe, about a fourteen-year-old Ugandan chess prodigy, and The Dragon Beneath, science journalist Emily Voigt’s investigation of the high-stakes world of exotic fish collectors. At W.W. Norton and Scribner, he has worked on the publication of books by a range of high-profile and bestselling authors, including Stephen King, Don DeLillo, Kathy Reichs, Colm Toibin, Ruth Rendell, Mary Roach, Tony Wagner, former First Lady Laura Bush, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of NYU, Whitlatch recently spent two weeks in Germany as a Frankfurt Fellow at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair. He has spoken on panels for the National Book Critics Circle, the James River Writers Conference, the Association of Authors’ Representatives, and at the MFA programs of NYU and Butler University.
Session 2L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Non-Fiction

Michelle Wildgen (Magazine Editor): Michelle Wildgen is an executive editor at Tin House Magazine, a former editor at Tin House Books, and the author of the novels You're Not You and But Not For Long. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is at work on her third novel.

Stephanie Wilkinson (Magazine Editor): Stephanie Wilkinson is co-editor of Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers which she founded in 2000 with Jennifer Niesslein.
Option 3: What Serves Our Needs At This Time

Ben H. Winters (Author): Ben H. Winters is the author of a number of novels for young readers and adults, including the psychological thriller Bedbugs, the Edgar Award-nominated middle-grade novel The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, and the New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. His new novel, a detective story called The Last Policeman, comes out in July 2012. Ben also writes plays and musicals, and is a former fellow of the Dramatists Guild. He teaches writing to schoolchildren all over the Boston area, and to adults at Grub Street. www.BenHWinters.com.
Session 1D: Writing For Kids

Caroline Zimmerman (Literary Agent): Caroline Zimmerman joined Kneerim & Williams in 2009. Previously, she held positions at Frontline, PBS's flagship investigative journalism series, at Vanity Fair media columnist Michael Wolff's Newser.com, at CBS, and at Harvard University's Transition Magazine. She graduated summa cum laude with a BA in English Literature from McGill University in Montreal, where she was culture editor of The McGill Daily. She grew up in Paris and speaks native English, French, and Spanish. Last year, Caroline co-founded a popular literary series showcasing New England's most established voices and its rising stars, selected among the region's top creative writing graduate programs. The first event was guest-hosted by Pulitzer-Prize winner Paul Harding. She is interested in literary fiction that engages with ideas but remains character-driven, literature in translation, pop culture, popular economics, social psychology, sociology, smart how-to, religion, travel, visual books, and women's issues.
Session 6L: Building Your Platform

Renée Zuckerbrot (Literary Agent): Before becoming an agent, Renée Zuckerbrot worked in the editorial departments at Putnam and Doubleday, where she was an editor. Her clients include Kelly Link, Keith Lee Morris, landscape ecologist Eric Sanderson (author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City), Harley Jane Kozak, Marie Bertino, DeDe Lahman and Neil Kleinberg (authors of Clinton St. Baking Company Cookbook), Pauls Toutonghi, and Deborah Lutz (author of Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and The New Eroticism). In 2008, Poets & Writers included her on their list of "Twenty-One Agents You Should Know."
Session 2K: Literary Idol