Authors - Brattleboro Literary Festival

Lauren Acampora

Lauren Acampora's first novel, The Paper Wasp, was named a Best Summer Read by The New York Times Book Review, USA Today, Oprah Magazine, ELLE, Town & Country, BBC.com, Daily Mail (UK), Tatler, Thrillist, and Publishers Weekly. It has also been nominated for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel...

Jabari Asim

Jabari Asim is the author of several adult and children's books, including Preaching to the Chickens which was named one of the NYT Best Illustrated Books of 2016 and Fifty Cents and a Dream-an NAACP Image Award Nominee, CCBC Choice, School Library Journal Editor's Choice, and Kirkus Best Book....

Mona Awad

Mona Awad was born in Montreal and has lived in the US since 2009. Her debut novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, won the Amazon Best First Novel Award, the Colorado Book Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Arab American Book Award....

Christopher Benfey

Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books, he has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies....

Emily Bernard

Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxford American, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and theatlantic.com. Her...

Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco and his family arrived in Miami as exiles from Cuba through Madrid, where he was born. The negotiation of cultural identity and universal themes of place and belonging characterize his five collections of poetry, including his latest, How to Love a Country. His poems have also appeared...

Michael Buckhard

Michael Burkard is the author of lucky coat anywhere (Nightboat Books, 2011); Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966–1990 (Nightboat Books, 2008); and Unsleeping(Sarabande Books, 2001), among others. He is the recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and the Whiting Writers’ Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for...

Ann Dávila Cardinal

Ann Dávila Cardinal is a novelist and Director of Recruitment for Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) where she also earned her MFA in Writing. She comes from a long line of Puerto Rican writers, including poets Virgilio and José Antonio Dávila, and her cousin, award-winning fiction writer Tere...

Christopher Castellani

Christopher Castellani is the author of three previous novels (the trilogy A Kiss from Maddalena, The Saint of Lost Things, and All This Talk of Love) and The Art of Perspective, a book of essays on the craft of fiction. His new, critically acclaimed book, Leading Men, is a...

Bart Casey

Bart Casey is a writer living in Brattleboro, Vermont. His passion is uncovering great stories from forgotten history. His new thriller novel, The Vavasour Macbeth, will be published in print, audiobook, and ebook editions on May 7, 2019. Blending fiction with little-known facts and academics in an easy style,...

Casey Cep

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among many other publications. Her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, is forthcoming in May...

Brinda Charry

Brinda Charry has published two novels (The Hottest Day of the Year and Naked in the Wind) and a collection of short fiction (First Love and other Stories). She has won the Katha Award for Short Fiction, the Picador Short Story Competition, and prizes in the BBC and Commonwealth...

Kim Chinquee

Kim Chinquee is the author of six fiction collections, mostly recently, Wetsuit, published by Ravenna Press. Her work has been published in over a hundred journals and anthologies, including The Nation, NOON, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and others. She is the recipient of...

Charles Coe

Charles Coe is the author of the poetry collection Picnic on the Moon. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous newspapers and literary reviews and magazines, and his poems have been set to music by composers Julia Carey, Beth Denisch and Robert Moran. Charles also writes feature articles,...

Susan Conley

Susan Conley is the author a new book, Elsey, Come Home and the novel Paris Was the Place and The Foremost Good Fortune, a book that won the Maine Literary Award for memoir. Born and raised in Maine, her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The...

Michael Datcher

Michael Datcher is the author the Ferguson-area historical novel Americus and the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Raising Fences —a Today Show Book Club Book of the Month pick. The film rights were originally optioned by actor Will Smith’s Overbrook Productions, who hired Datcher to write the screenplay. Datcher...

Andrew Delbanco

Andrew Delbanco is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University. Author of many notable books, including College, Melville, The Death of Satan, Required Reading, The Real American Dream, and The Puritan Ordeal, he was recently appointed president of the Teagle Foundation, which supports liberal education for...

Patrick Donnelly

Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry including his latest, Little- Known Operas. Former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, Donnelly is the director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, and an associate editor of Poetry International. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review,...

Joseph Ellis

Joseph Ellis is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers and twelve other books including a new book American Dialog: The Founding Fathers and Us. His book American Sphinx: the Character of Thomas Jefferson, won the National Book Award. He is the Ford Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at...

Glynnis Fawkes

Glynnis Fawkes’ book on the life of Charlotte Brontë, part of the Center for Cartoon Studies Graphic Biography Series, will be published by Disney/Hyperion this fall. A collection of her work, Persephone's Garden, will also come out this fall with Secret Acres. Her comics have appeared in the New...

Charles Fergus

Charles Fergus writes historical fiction. His novel “A Stranger Here Below” is a mystery set in 1835; it was influenced by the personal tragedy of his own mother’s murder. Fergus has had 19 books published, including many about nature and wildlife. He lives in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom with his wife,...

Jeff Friedman

Jeff Friedman’s newest book, The Marksman, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in fall 2020. He is the author of seven previous poetry collections, including Floating Tales, Pretenders and Working in Flour. Friedman’s poems, mini stories and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England...

Joshua Furst

Joshua Furst is the author of Revolutionaries, a novel family upheaval, political tumult, and ruined hopes centered around Yippie co-founder Abbie Hoffman (1936-1989), who challenged the political establishment in the ’60s with anarchic humor, incendiary rhetoric, and heedless mischief. He is the author of two other books , Short...

Miciah Bay Gault

Miciah Bay Gault’s debut novel Good Night, Stranger is forthcoming this summer. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Sun Magazine, Agni, The Southern Review, The Literary Review, and in the anthology Contemporary Vermont Fiction. Miciah was the editor of Hunger Mountain at Vermont College of...

Brattleboro Literary Festival 2018 Authors