Authors - Brattleboro Literary Festival

Jacob M Appel

Jacob M. Appel's first novel, The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up, won the Dundee International Book Award in 2012. His short story collection, Scouting for the Reaper, won the 2012 Hudson Prize and was published by Black Lawrence in November 2013. He is the author of five other collections...

Kerri Arsenault

Kerri Arsenault is a writer, editor, photographer, and National Book Critics Circle Board member. Her writings have appeared in Freeman’s, Kirkus Reviews, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and other publications. She is also a columnist at Lithub.com and Editor for Jewels of the North Atlantic (coming...

Katherine Arden

Born in Austin, Texas, Katherine Arden spent a year of high school in Rennes, France. Following her acceptance to Middlebury College in Vermont, she deferred enrollment for a year in order to live and study in Moscow. At Middlebury, she specialized in French and Russian literature. After receiving her...

Michelle Burford

Michelle Burford Michelle Burford, a celebrity ghostwriter and story surgeon, grew up in Phoenix, AZ. Before she moved to New York, she sold stilettos during the night shift at Sears in Colorado’s Chapel Hill Mall. Eventually, she became the founding Senior Editor of O, The Oprah Magazine. She has helped to...

Avi

Avi and his twin sister were born in New York City to Joseph Wortis, a psychiatrist, and Helen Wortis, a social worker. When he was a year old, his sister gave him the nickname "Avi." Two of Avi's grandfathers were writers, and one grandmother was a playwright. In...

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. She has translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria, and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised...

Stephen Burt

Stephen (also Steph and Stephanie) Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with eight published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf Press, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her next...

Olivia Kate Cerrone

Olivia Kate Cerrone’s historical novella, The Hunger Saint (Bordighera Press, 2017), about the child miners of Sicily, was praised by Kirkus Reviews as "a well-crafted and affecting literary tale." SPD Books also listed The Hunger Saint as a Fiction Bestseller for May & June 2017. Her writing has appeared...

Jill Bialosky

Jill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied for her undergraduate degree at Ohio University and received a Master of Arts degree from the Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Bialosky has published several...

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc. Her poetry collections include Unfathoming (Four Way Books, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long...

Bill Dodson

James (Jim) Dodson is currently Writer-in-Residence for The Pilot newspaper and Editor of award-winning PineStraw Magazine the arts and culture magazine of the Carolina Sandhills. He also serves as Founding Editor of O.Henry Magazine, the arts and culture sister publication in Greensboro, and Salt Magazine in Wilmington. Over the course...

John Freeman Gill

John Freeman Gill is a native New Yorker and longtime New York Times contributor whose work has been anthologized in The New York Times Book of New York and More New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of The New York Times. His writing has appeared in...

Dede Cummings

Dede Cummings is a writer, literary agent/publisher and commentator for Vermont Public Radio. Her collection, To Look Out From, is the winner of the 4th annual Homebound Publications Poetry Prize, and was published by Homebound Publications in April, 2017. In 2013, she was a poetry contributor at the Bread...

John Freeman

John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary biannual of new writing, and executive editor of Lit Hub. His books include "How to Read a Novelist" and "The Tyranny of E-mail," as well as "Tales of Two Cities," an anthology of new writing about inequality in New York...

Molly Booth

Molly Booth is the author of Shakespeare-inspired Young Adult novels SAVING HAMLET (2016) and NOTHING HAPPENED (spring 2018), both published by Disney Hyperion. Her books use Shakespeare to tell stories that she hopes will empower young people. She also directs the All the World’s a Stage Players, a Shakespearean...

Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel received a BFA degree from Emerson College and a MFA degree from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including: Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh, 2009), and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh,...

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

Gretchen Gerzina is a dean of the Commonwealth Honors College at UMass Amherst, and was named the Paul Murray Kendall Chair in Biography there in 2016. Previously, Gerzina was a professor at Dartmouth College where she held the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professorship in Biography, and served as chair of...

Maggie Dietz

Maggie Dietz’s most recent collection, That Kind of Happy, was published in 2016. She is also the author of Perennial Fall and coeditor of Americans’ Favorite Poems, Poems to Read, and An Invitation to Poetry. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Ruth Franklin

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction...

Liza Ketchum

Liza Ketchum is the author of seventeen books for young people, including The Life Fantastic (F+W Media, 2016), Out of Left Field (Untreed Reads, 2014) and Newsgirl (Viking, 2009), nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award and a Boston Authors Club “Highly Recommended” book. Her novel in two voices,Where the...

Bill Goldstein

Bill Goldstein, the founding editor of the books site of The New York Times on the Web, reviews books and interviews authors for NBC's "Weekend Today in New York." He is also curator of public programs at Roosevelt House, the public policy institute of New York's Hunter College. He...

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of four collections of poetry, including Roll Deep (Norton: 2015), which won the 2016 Vermont Book Award and was hailed in the New York Times Book Review as “a remixed odyssey.” His other volumes include Holding Company (Norton: 2010), Hoops (Norton: 2006), and Leaving...

María José Giménez

María José Giménez is a Venezuelan-Canadian poet and translator. Her publications include original and translated poetry, short fiction, essays, screenplays, a mountaineering memoir by Edurne Pasaban, and Alejandro Saravia’s novel Red, Yellow and Green (Biblioasis, 2016), winner of 2016 Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Awarded...

Julia Foulkes

Julia Foulkes’s most recent book, A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York, examines what this legendary musical and film reveal about mid-20th century New York. Her first book, Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (2002), explores how gender, sexuality, race,...

Brattleboro Literary Festival 2017 Authors