Tuesday, October 20, 2009

November 17: Susan McCallum-Smith and Adrienne Kane

Susan McCallum-Smith is a freelance editor, and writes fiction, non-fiction and reviews. Her work has been featured in, amongst others, Urbanite, The Scottish Review of Books, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Gettysburg Review, and her reviews are often heard on Maryland Public Radio. She received her degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and Bennington College. Her short story collection, Slipping the Moorings, was published in early 2009 by Entasis Press. She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and currently lives in Baltimore, USA.

Adrienne Kane's most recent book, Cooking and Screaming, was published in February 2009 by Simon & Schuster. She is also the author and photographer of the popular food blog Nosheteria.com, which has a permanent link on Huffington Post. Adrienne's work as a food writer, recipe developer, and food photographer has appeared in Natural Health, Chow, and Digs, and on FoodandWine.com. Her personal essay, "Bring Tenacity to a Boil: Then Serve" is featured in Note to Self: 30 Women on Hardship, Humiliation, Heartbreak, and Overcoming It All. She currently lives and cooks in New Haven, CT.

October 20: Debby Applegate and Adam Braver

Debby Applegate’s first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, was the product of 20 years of research. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was widely acclaimed as one of the best books of 2006.
Debby holds degrees from Amherst and Yale and has taught at Yale and Wesleyan Universities. She currently teaches a master class on writing biography and memoir at the Writing Center at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She lives in New Haven with her husband, the business writer Bruce Tulgan, and serves on the governing boards of the New Haven Review, the Yale Summer Cabaret and the Friends of the Amherst College Library. Debby is currently researching a cultural biography of Polly Adler, Manhattan's most infamous madam from the 1920s through the 1940s, and whose 1953 autobiography, A House is Not a Home, became a best-selling book and a Hollywood film starring Shelley Winters.

Adam Braver is the author of Mr. Lincoln’s Wars, Divine Sarah, Crows Over the Wheatfield, and November 22, 1963. His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Border’s Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list; and have been translated into Italian, Japanese, and French. His work has appeared in journals such as Daedalus, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Water-Stone Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, West Branch, and Post Road. He is on the faculty and writer-in-residence at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. He also teaches in the Stonecoast MFA, and at the NY State Summer Writers Institute.