Authors - Brattleboro Literary Festival

Martha Ackmann

Martha Ackmann is a journalist, author and editor who writes about women that have changed America. Her works have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and many other publications around the country. A frequent contributor to the op-ed pages of the nation’s...

Erin Almond

Erin Almond is a novelist, short story writer, essayist and reviewer. Her work has been published in The Boston Globe, Colorado Review, Normal School, Small Spiral Notebook, and on Cognoscenti.com and The Rumpus.net. Her book Witches' Dance was published in October 2019. She is a graduate of the UC-Irvine...

Steve Almond

Steve Almond is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Against Football and Candyfreak. His short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, the Best American Mysteries, and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. His essays and reviews have appeared in...

Amir Ahmadi Arian

Amir Ahmadi Arian began as a journalist in Iran in 2000 and has since published a collection of stories, a nonfiction book, and two novels in Persian. His new novel, Then the Fish Swallowed Him, was published in March. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L...

Cameron Awkward-Rich

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. He is a Cave Canem fellow, a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine, and his new collection of poetry, Dispatch, was published in December 2019. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts...

Sam Brakeley

Sam Brakeley is the author of three books including most recently Skiing with Henry Knox, released in October of 2019. He’s also an avid backpacker, skier, canoeist and adventurer who has logged over 8000 miles (and counting) of multi-week expeditions. He lives in Vermont.

Sarah Chayes

Sarah Chayes's remarkable trajectory has led her from reporting from Paris for National Public Radio and covering the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan to running a soap factory in downtown Kandahar in the midst of a reigniting insurgency. She went on to advise the topmost levels of the...

Diane Cook

Diane Cook is the author of the new novel, The New Wilderness, short-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection, Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First...

Julie Carrick Dalton

Julie Carrick Dalton is a journalist, organic farmer, and novelist. Her work has appeared in publications including The Boston Globe, Inc. Magazine, BusinessWeek, The Hollywood Reporter, and Baby Talk. Her short fiction has appeared in various online and print journals. Her debut novel Four Degrees will be published in...

Natalie Diaz

Natalie Diaz is the author of the award-winning poetry collection When My Brother Was an Aztec and a new collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award. She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a USA Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a Native Arts...

Andre Dubus III

Andre Dubus III is the author of The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, Bluesman, and the New York Times bestsellers, House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days (soon to be a major motion picture) and his memoir, Townie, a #4 New York Times bestseller and a...

Ezekiel Emanuel

Ezekiel Emanuel is an oncologist and author of two new books, The Trillion Dollar Revolution and Which Country Has the World’s Best Healthcare?. Dr. Emanuel’s recent publications include the books Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly...

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn is the author of a forthcoming memoir, This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and three previous memoirs, including the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award–winning Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and four volumes of poetry. A professor on the creative writing faculty at the University of...

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, Gathering the Tribes, and her new collection, In the Lateness of the World. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was published by Penguin...

Kelli Jo Ford

Kelli Jo Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Her first novel Crooked Hallelujah, was released in July o critical acclaim. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize, the Everett Southwest Literary Award, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award...

Amity Gaige

Amity Gaige is the author of four novels, O My Darling, The Folded World, Schroder, and a new novel Sea Wife. Published in eighteen countries, Schroder was named one of best books of 2013 by The New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Wall Street...

Holly George-Warren

Holly George-Warren is an award-winning writer, editor, producer, and music consultant. She has contributed to more than two dozen books about rock and roll, including The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock, and The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of...

Peter Geye

Peter Geye received his MFA from the University of New Orleans and his PhD from Western Michigan University, where he was editor of Third Coast. Geye is the author of the award winning novels, Safe from the Sea, The Lighthouse Road, and Wintering, winner of the Minnesota Book Award...

Sadia Hassan

Sadia Hassan is a Somali American essayist and poet, and is an MFA Candidate at the University of Mississippi. She is the winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation’s 2020 Award for College Writers in Poetry. Her essay "Silence is a Lonely Country" was nominated for the 2019...

Jennifer Haupt

Jennifer Haupt is journalist, author, and writing instructor with more than 25 years of experience helping people to mine their stories. Her interviews, articles and essays have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, The Rumpus, Psychology Today, Travel & Leisure, The Seattle Times, Spirituality & Health, The Sun, and...

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including his new collection The Absurd Man, His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim...

Alden Jones

Alden Jones was born in New York, raised in New Jersey, and educated at Brown University, New York University, and the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her critical memoir, The Wanting Was a Wilderness, was published in May 2020. Her first book, The Blind Masseuse: A Traveler’s Memoir from Costa Rica...

Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen and a half novels, six story collections, a couple of standalone novellas, and a couple of one-shot comic books. Stephen’s been an NEA recipient, has won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction,...

Jessica Keener

Jessica Keener is the author of the nationally acclaimed novels Strangers in Budapest and Night Swim and a collection of award-winning short stories, Women in Bed. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Redbook, the Boston Globe, Agni, and other publications, and she has taught English literature...

Brattleboro Literary Festival 2020 Authors