Rachel Kadish
I often begin writing when something is bothering me. Years ago, I was thinking about Virginia Woolf’s question: what if Shakespeare had had an equally talented sister?
Woolf’s answer: She died without writing a word.
What, I wondered, would it take for a woman of that era, with that kind of capacious intelligence, not to die without writing a word?
For one thing, she’d have to be a genius at breaking rules.
My novel The Weight of Ink reaches back in time to ask the question: what does it take for a woman not to be defeated when everything around her is telling her to sit down and mind her manners? I started writing with two characters in mind, both women who don’t mind their manners: a contemporary historian named Helen Watt and a seventeenth
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Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
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In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
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Lalita Tademy
LALITA TADEMY left the corporate world to immerse herself in tracing her family's history and writing her first historical novel, CANE RIVER. Her debut was selected by Oprah Winfrey as her summer book group pick in 2001.
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Lalita Tademy's second historical novel, RED RIVER is set during Reconstruction-era Louisiana a time period and subject matter often summarily skimmed in our history books. The story of Red River begins in 1873, and follows the ramifications of an incident on Easter Sunday of that year on successive generations of two families involved.
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Rebecca Goldstein
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy, and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in philosophy. While in graduate school she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.
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After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body -
Uzma Jalaluddin
I write funny, nuanced stories about Muslims, South Asians, Canadians, people. MUCH ADO ABOUT NADA (June 2023), THREE HOLIDAYS AND A WEDDING (Sept 2023), HANA KHAN CARRIES ON (2021) and AYESHA AT LAST (2019). Find out more at www.uzmajalaluddin.com and thanks for visiting!
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Amanda Skenandore
Amanda Skenandore is an award-winning author of historical fiction and a registered nurse. Her books have been translated into multiple languages and garnered accolades from the American Library Association, Reader’s Digest, Silicon Valley Reads, and Apple Books. She is a 2024 Nevada Arts Council’s literary fellow. Amanda lives in Las Vegas with her husband and their pet turtle, Lenore.
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Elinor Florence
My new historical novel Finding Flora, about women homesteaders on the prairies, was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2025.
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My debut novel Bird's Eye View, about a young woman who joins the air force in World War Two and becomes an aerial photographic interpreter, became a Canadian bestseller in 2016.
My second novel Wildwood is about a single mother from the big city who must fulfill the conditions of her inheritance by living for one year in an abandoned, off-the-grid farmhouse in northern Canada.
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Donal Ryan
Donal Ryan is the author of the novels The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December, the short-story collection A Slanting of the Sun, and the forthcoming novel All We Shall Know. He holds a degree in Law from the University of Limerick, and worked for the National Employment Rights Authority before the success of his first two novels allowed him to pursue writing as a full-time career.
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Shion Miura
Shion Miura (三浦しをん) (1976–) , daughter of a well-known Japanese classics scholar, acquired her love of reading at a very young age. When, as a senior in the Faculty of Letters at Waseda University, she began her job hunt looking for an editorial position, a literary agent recognized her writing talent and hired her to begin writing an online book review column even before she graduated. Miura made her fiction debut a year after finishing college, in 2000, when she published the novel Kakuto suru mono ni maru (A Passing Grade for Those Who Fight), based in part on her own experiences during the job hunt. When she won the Naoki Prize in 2006 for her linked-story collection Mahoro ekimae Tada Benriken (The Handymen in Mahoro Town), she had not
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Laila Ibrahim
My education and experience in multiracial, developmental psychology and attachment theory provide ample fodder for my novels. My passion for early childhood education, child birth and religious education are reflected in my writing.
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I was the founder and director of Woolsey Children's School where I had first hand experience loving children that were not my own. There are scenes in Yellow Crocus that were largely influenced interactions I had with children from Woolsey.
As a birth doula I had the privilege of witnessing the intensity and joy of childbirth. You can see that my birth experiences are reflected in my novels.
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Michael David Lukas
Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a late-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a Rotary Scholar in Tunisia. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, his writing has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and the Georgia Review. He has received scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. When he isn’t writing, he teaches creative writing to third and fourth graders.
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Elizabeth Letts
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Australian-born Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, and attended Bethlehem College Ashfield and the University of Sydney. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald for three years as a feature writer with a special interest in environmental issues.
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Dara Horn
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Kate Atkinson
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Born in Denmark to Norwegian parents, Undset spent most of her life in Norway. After her father's early death, she had to forgo formal education and worked as a secretary while writing in her spare time. Her debut novel Fru Marta Oulie (1907) shocked readers with its opening confession of adultery and established her bold, realist style. -
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Coetzee’s breakthrough novel, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), established him as a major literary voice, while Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won him the first of his two Booker Prizes. His best-known work, Disgrace (1999), a stark and unsettling examination of post-apartheid South Africa, secured his second Booker Pri -
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Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbara Ehrenreich was an American author and political activist. During the 1980s and early 1990s, she was a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America. She was a widely read and award-winning columnist and essayist and the author of 21 books. Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a memoir of her three-month experiment surviving on a series of minimum-wage jobs. She was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award and the Erasmus Prize.
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Lisa See
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Rachel Kushner
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Elizabeth Strout
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Nell Freudenberger
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Deborah Ellis
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
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Deborah Ellis has achieved international acclaim with her courageous and dramatic books that give Western readers a glimpse into the plight of children in developing countries.
She has won the Governor General's Award, Sweden's Peter Pan Prize, the Ruth Schwartz Award, the University of California's Middle East Book Award, the Jane Addams Children's Book Award and the Vicky Metcalf Award.
A long-time feminist and anti-war activist, she is best known for The Breadwinner Trilogy, which has been published around the world in seventeen languages, with more than a million dollars in royalties donated to Street Kids International and to Women for Women, an organi -
Mitchell James Kaplan
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Mitchell James Kaplan's 2010 novel, By Fire, By Water, won numerous literary awards both domestically and abroad. Into The Unbounded Night, a novel of first century Rome and the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, will be out in September, 2020 (Regal House). Rhapsody, a novel about Kay Swift and her 1920s Broadway circle, including her lover George Gershwin, will appear in 2021 (Gallery / Simon & Schuster) -
Dara Horn
Dara Horn is the award-winning author of six books. One of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists (2007), she is the recipient of three National Jewish Book Awards, among other honors, and she was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Wingate Prize, the Simpson Family Literary Prize, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books, Booklist’s 25 Best Books of the Decade, and San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of the Year, and have been translated into twelve languages.
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Her nonfiction work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Tablet, and The Jewish Review of Books, among many other publications.
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Mary Ann Winkowski
A happily married, devout Catholic, suburban mother and full-time paranormal investigator, Mary Ann Winkowski has been able to see earthbound spirits, spirits that are trapped on earth and haven't "crossed over," since she was a little girl. Mary Ann works with these spirits to help them make peace with what keeps them here - whether it be people they can't let go of or homes they love. "
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Duong Van Mai Elliott
Dương Văn Mai Elliott is a Vietnamese-American writer and translator. She was born and raised in Vietnam, and was awarded a scholarship in 1960 to pursue post-secondary education in the United States. She then studied diplomacy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington D.C. She graduated from Georgetown in 1963 with a major in Political Science. She then returned to Saigon, where she worked for the RAND Corporation interviewing Viet Cong prisoners of war and defectors for a research project to determine the morale and motivation of the guerrillas during the Vietnam War. She met her American husband, David W.P. Elliott, (now a professor of Political Science) while a student in Washington, D.C., and the two married in
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Michael Castleman
Michael Castleman is the author of three previous Ed Rosenberg novels: The Lost Gold of San Francisco, Death Caps, and A Killing in Real Estate. He lives in San Francisco.
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Medora Sale
AKA Caroline Roe
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As Medora Sale, Caroline Roe has written six police procedurals, including an Arthur Ellis Award winner. These books are set in and about Toronto and feature homicide detective John Sanders and architectural photographer Harriet Jeffries. As Caroline Roe, Medora used her PhD research on religious diversity in medieval times to re-create the character of the Bishop of Girona's Jewish physician, a 14th-century doctor with important patients and a nose for wrong-doing.
Medora is a past president of both Crime Writers of Canada and the international board of Sisters in Crime. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Harry, when they are not researching background material in Spain.
Series:
* John Sanders and Harriet Jeffries
Series c