From October 3 to November 11, the Williston Northampton School will host the 16th Annual Writers’ Workshop Series. This year the series features award-winning authors Rebecca Makkai, Patricia McCormick, Elinor Lipman, and Mary Jo Salter. Lectures are free and open to the public and begin at 7:00 p.m. in the Dodge Room of the Reed Campus Center.
Rebecca Makkai, author of The Borrower, will visit campus on Thursday, October 3 to speak about her short stories and upcoming novel, The Hundred-Year House. Williston will welcome National Book Award finalist, Patricia McCormick author of Sold and Purple Heart on Monday, October 7. Elinor Lipman, parent of a Williston alumnus and author of such novels as The View from Penthouse B and Then She Found Me, will return to campus on Tuesday, November 5. Poet and former Mount Holyoke College professor Mary Jo Salter will conclude the series with her talk on Monday, November 11.
Rebecca Makkai, Thursday, October 3, 2013
Rebecca Makkai’s first novel, The Borrower, was a Booklist Top Ten Debut, an Indie Next pick, an O Magazine selection and one of Chicago Magazine‘s choices for best fiction of 2011. Her short fiction was chosen for The Best American Short Stories in 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008, and has been featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, New Stories from the Midwest, Best New Fantasy, and several college literature textbooks. Her new stories appear regularly in publications such as Harper’s, Tin House, Ploughshares, New England Review and Ecotone, and on public radio’s This American Life and Selected Shorts. Ms. Makkai teaches at Lake Forest College, StoryStudio Chicago, and Sierra Nevada College. Her second novel, The Hundred-Year House, will be available in summer, 2014 from Viking/Penguin.
Patricia McCormick, Monday, October 7, 2013
Patricia McCormick, author of Never Fall Down, has written four other critically acclaimed novels: Sold, a moving account of sexual trafficking and a National Book Award finalist; Purple Heart, a suspenseful psychological novel that explores the killing of a 10-year-old boy in Iraq; My Brother’s Keeper, a realistic view of teenage substance abuse; and Cut, an intimate portrait of one girl’s struggle with self-injury. Ms. McCormick was named a New York Foundation on the Arts fellow in 2004. She is also the winner of the 2009 German Peace Prize for Youth Literature. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and lives Manhattan.
Elinor Lipman, Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Elinor Lipman is the author of 10 novels, including The View from Penthouse B, Then She Found Me, and The Inn at Lake Devine, and two works of nonfiction, I Can’t Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays and Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus. She lives in Massachusetts and New York City and is the parent of a graduate of the Williston Northampton School.
Mary Jo Salter, Monday, November 11, 2013
Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was educated at Harvard and Cambridge and taught at Mount Holyoke College for many years. In addition to her six previous poetry collections, she is the author of a children’s book, The Moon Comes Home, and a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore.