Laurie Lico Albanese is an award-winning author whose novels about women, art and self-discovery are widely praised book club favorites. Her 2017 novel Stolen Beauty, about Gustav Klimt’s iconic golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Baeur that was stolen by the Nazis during WW2, was lauded by the Wall Street Journal as “a work of art itself.” Laurie’s new novel, Hester, is a first-person fictional account of the “real” Hester Prynne’s love affair with Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1829 Salem. It will be published by Macmillan in Fall 2022. Bestselling author Fiona Davis calls Hester "a masterpiece that should be required reading alongside Hawthorne’s classic tale of adultery. Laurie is the mother of two grown children, teaches writing, and lives with her husband Frank Albanese in Montclair, NJ.
Jonathan Alter, a resident of Montclair, is an award-winning author, political analyst, documentary filmmaker, columnist, and television producer and radio host. He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers – one on Franklin Roosevelt and two on Barack Obama – and his latest book, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life, is just out in paperback. Since 1996, Alter has been a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He is the co-host, with his three adult children, of Alter Family Politics on SiriusXM 102. In 2019, he co-produced and co-directed the HBO, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists, which won the 2020 Emmy for Outstanding Historical Documentary.
Paul Auster is the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and the New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012, he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He has also been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Music of Chance), the Edgar Award (City of Glass), and the Man Booker Prize (4 3 2 1). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Mona Awad is the author of the novel Bunny, published by Viking in 2019. Bunny was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror and for the New England Book Award; it was selected as a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, Bookriot, Electric Literature, CBC Books, and the New York Public Library. Her first novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl won the Amazon Best First Novel Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. She earned an MFA in Fiction from Brown University and a PhD in Creative Writing and English from the University of Denver. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University.
Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian who has published biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Robert Ames—and now The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter. He has also authored a memoir about his childhood in the Middle East. He is the Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and now lives in Glen Ridge with her family. She is the author of six books of poems, most recently Of Marriage (Alice James Books 2018) and Girl After Girl After Girl (Louisiana State University Press 2017). She has been awarded the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a NJ Arts Council Grant. She is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University where she is a professor of English.
Katherine Dykstra is the author of What Happened to Paula: On the Death of an American Girl, a New York Times Best Book of Summer and a People magazine Best Summer Read among other superlatives. Creative Capital named her an "artist to watch" for her work on the Paula Oberbroeckling story. For many years, she served as senior nonfiction editor at Guernica and taught narrative nonfiction in NYU's continuing studies program. Her essays have been published in The Washington Post, Crab Orchard Review, The Common, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Brain, Child, Poets and Writers, Real Simple and the Random House anthology 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers, among other places. Her work has been included in the "Notables" section of both the 2015 and 2016 Best American Essays collections. She lives in Montclair with her husband and two children.
Jiayang Fan has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2016. She is at work on her first book, Motherland, forthcoming by FSG in 2023.
Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer and visual artist. Her work was a Notable Mention in Best American Essays 2017, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Redivider, Catapult, Hobart, Longreads, and Hotel Amerika, among others. She is Associate Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute. Find her at www.megangalbraith.com
Gabrielle Glaser is an investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author, most recently of the American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, which examines postwar adoption in the US through the eyes of one teenager and the son she was forced to relinquish. She lays bare how a predatory adoption industry coerced more than three million young mothers into surrendering their sons and daughters into a secretive system, and unearths the attitudes towards sex, marriage, gender and race that underlay this chapter of a not-so-distant American past. Her work on the intersection of health, medicine, and culture have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and The Washington Post, among many other publications.
David Greenberg is a Professor of History and of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He is currently writing a biography of Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights leader, for Simon & Schuster. He is the author or editor of several books on American history and politics including Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (2003); Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency (2016); Calvin Coolidge (2006); and Alan Brinkley: A Life in History (2019). Formerly acting editor of the New Republic and columnist for Slate, he now writes for Politico, among many other scholarly and popular publications. He holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and a BA from Yale and lives with his family in Manhattan.
Garth Risk Hallberg’s first novel, City on Fire, was a New York Times and international bestseller, has been translated into 17 languages, and was named one of the best books of 2015 the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle,the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Vogue. He is also the author of a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family. His short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Glimmer Train, and Best New American Voices 2008, and he has written critical essays for the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, The Millions, and Slate.
Through her company, Sankofa Stories, Shirley Johnson specializes in telling stories from the past that can impact the future. Johnson, a former educator, is a storyteller of African, African-American and multicultural tales both historical and folk. Membership in organizations such as, National Storytelling Network, NABS (National Association of Black Storytellers) the New Jersey Storytelling Guild, NJ Storynet and the SIS (Steeped in Stories) has nurtured her love of story and led her to many venues for telling. As co-founder of the storytelling group, Steeped in Stories, Shirley has been able to collaborate with other storytellers in honing their skills and working with those new to the joy of story.
Daniel Kirk is the author and illustrator of over 40 books for children, including his best-selling series of Library Mouse books, his non-fiction picture book Rhino in the House and his latest picture book, Newton and Curie, Science Squirrels.
Katie Kitamura is the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Her third novel, A Separation, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori. It was named a Best Book of the Year by over a dozen publications, translated into sixteen languages, and is being adapted for film. Her new novel, Intimacies, was published in July 2021 and was a Barack Obama Summer Reading Selection. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among other publications, and her other writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is the winner of the Berlin Prize and the Bard Fiction Prize, and was a Rome Prize Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Staten Island and teaches at the New School.
Christina Baker Kline is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World, Christina Baker Kline is published in 40 countries. Her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other prizes, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities and schools as “One Book, One Read” selections. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as the New York Times and the NYT Book Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, and Slate.
Hayley Krischer is a journalist and author of young adult fiction. Her debut novel, Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf, was on the shortlist in the New York Times, a Book Expo buzz book pick for 2020 and selected for the 2021 Rise: A Feminist Book Project List from the American Library Association. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times and has written for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Marie Claire, The Rumpus, Lenny Letter and many other outlets. Hayley Krischer lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with her husband, two kids, one dog, and three cats. Website: www.hayleykrischer.net
Sarah McGrath is Vice President and Editor in Chief of Riverhead Books, where she acquires and edits a range of fiction and nonfiction. Among the many critically acclaimed, prize-winning, and New York Times-bestselling authors she currently works with are: Brit Bennett, Elizabeth Gilbert, Lauren Groff, Paula Hawkins, Khaled Hosseini, Katie Kitamura, Chang-rae Lee, Maile Meloy, Sigrid Nunez, Helen Oyeyemi, Emma Straub, Gabriel Tallent, and Meg Wolitzer. Ms. McGrath began her career in publishing at Knopf in 1997 and spent seven years as an editor at Scribner, before coming to Riverhead in 2006.
Budd Mishkin has been a broadcast journalist for almost forty years. He is currently news anchor for 1010 WINS Radio. He’s interviewed countless artists and luminaries for radio and television and has created and hosted nights of conversation at venues in New York, New Jersey and beyond. He is the creator and host of "Stories from the First 60 Years," a personal narrative podcast that is now a one man stage show. Look for his new podcast about professional and personal journeys, "Before The Cheering Started."
Carolyn Murnick is an award-winning journalist and the author of the investigative memoir The Hot One, recommended by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, and Elle, and named a Best Book of the Year by Buzzfeed. She is a TEDx speaker and commentator on women and crime for media outlets including NBC, CBS, and Investigation Discovery, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Interview, and numerous anthologies. She lives in Brooklyn.
Victoria Christopher Murray is an acclaimed author with more than one million books in print. She has written more than twenty novels, including Stand Your Ground, a NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Fiction and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Lin Oliver is a children’s book writer and a writer and producer for both TV and film. She is currently the executive director of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). Together, Henry Winkler and Oliver are the co-authors of the bestselling Hank Zipzer and Here’s Hank series. They both live in Los Angeles.
Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer. She is the author of the memoir, Made in China, and her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika Review, Kweli Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn. Find out more at annaqu.com.
Jayne Anne Phillips, National Book Award finalist, twice an NBCC finalist, is the author of five novels, Quiet Dell, Lark And Termite, MotherKind, Shelter, and Machine Dreams, and two widely anthologized story collections, Fast Lanes, and Black Tickets. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Bunting Fellowship, a Howard Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship. (See www.jayneannephilips.com)
Robert Reich is a philosopher who directs Stanford University’s Center for Ethics in Society and is associate director of its new Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He is a leading thinker at the intersection of ethics and technology, a prizewinning author, and has won multiple teaching awards. He helped create the global movement #GivingTuesday and serves as chair of its board.
Lori Richmond is a children's author-illustrator from Brooklyn, New York. She loves drawing, running, and finding inspiration around New York City... and she's just a little bit obsessed with her kitten. Her first picture book as author-illustrator, Pax and Blue, was called a "sprightly debut" by The New York Times and selected for exhibition in the Society of Illustrators 'Original Art' show. She is also the author-illustrator of Scholastic’s Bunny's Staycation and Bunny Business, and the illustrator of several other picture books with major houses. Go to www.loridraws.com to see more of Lori's work. You can buy her books at Watchung Booksellers here, on Lori's website here, or wherever good books are sold. You can also find Lori on Instagram here where she holds weekly drawing classes for kids.
Dale Russakoff spent 28 years as a reporter for the Washington Post and is now a freelance writer, focusing on education and immigration. She is the author of The Prize -- Who's in Charge of America's Schools (Houghton Mifflin, 2015), a New York Times best-seller about Mark Zuckerberg's $100 million gift to the Newark schools. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, ProPublica and elsewhere. Dale and her husband have lived in Montclair for 25 years and have two grown sons who attended Montclair Public Schools.
Mehran Sahami was recruited to Google in its start-up days by Sergey Brin and was one of the inventors of email spam-filtering technology. With a background in machine learning and artificial intelligence, he returned to Stanford as a computer science professor in 2007 and helped redesign the undergraduate computer science curriculum. He is one of the instructors of Stanford’s massive introductory computer programming course taken by nearly 1,500 students per year. Mehran is also a limited partner in several VC funds and serves as an adviser to high-tech start-ups.
Brandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.
Jonathan Santlofer is a writer and artist. His debut novel, The Death Artist, was an international bestseller, a People Magazine “Page-Turner of the Week” and is currently in development at Fox, along with his second and third novels. His fourth novel, Anatomy of Fear, won the Nero Award for best crime novel of 2009. Jonathan created the Crime Fiction Academy at The Center for Fiction. As an artist, Jonathan has been making replications of famous paintings for wealthy clients for more than 20 years.
Nancy Star is the author of five novels including the bestselling Sisters, One, Two, Three, which landed on the Publishers Weekly list of Top Ten Bestsellers of 2016. Her sixth novel, Rules for Moving, the story of a beloved advice columnist whose life is out of control, as published in May 2020 by Lake Union. In addition to her novels, Nancy’s essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Family Circle, among other places. Before becoming a novelist, she spent over a decade working as a movie executive at the Samuel Goldwyn Company and The Ladd Company, dividing her time between New York and London. She raised and launched two kids here in Montclair, where she still lives with her husband.
Colm Tóibín is the author of 10 novels, including The Magician, his most recent novel; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.
Ly Tran graduated from Columbia University in 2014 with a degree in Creative Writing and Linguistics. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, and Yaddo. House of Sticks is her first book.
A contributing editor at the Boston Globe, Kate Tuttle is a former president of the National Book Critics Circle and has also acted as a judge for the National Book Awards. Her book reviews and articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post.
Qian Julie Wang is a graduate of Yale Law School and Swarthmore College. Formerly a commercial litigator, she is now managing partner of Gottlieb & Wang LLP, a firm dedicated to advocating for education and civil rights. Her writing has appeared in major publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two rescue dogs, Salty and Peppers.
Chris White III is a percussionist, dancer, teacher and artist who has worked as a modern dance musician at NJPAC, Montclair State University, Rutger's University & Ballet Tech.
Henry Winkler is an Emmy Award–winning actor, writer, director, and producer who has created some of the most iconic TV roles, including Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli on Happy Days and Gene Cousineau on Barry. Winkler and Lin Oliver are the co-authors of the bestselling Hank Zipzer and Here’s Hank series. They both live in Los Angeles.
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the award-winning novel Land of Love and Drowning, as well as the poetry collection Wife. Winner of the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Award and a Fulbright scholarship. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2020. Originally from the Virgin Islands, she now lives in Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University.
Stevie Van Zandt is a beloved musician, songwriter, actor, radio host, and activist. He is best known as the guitarist of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band and the lead member of Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. He is also known for his acting work, most notably in The Sopranos (Silvio Dante) and Lilyhammer (Frank Tagliano); his radio work as the host of Little Steven's Underground Garage and creator of the first two branded music channels on Sirius XM (The Underground Garage and Outlaw Country);and his devotion to music education (the TeachRock.org music history curriculum). In 2014, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the E Street Band. He lives in Greenwich Village with his wife Maureen and Edie the dog.
Thad Ziolkowski is the author of the memoir On a Wave, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and Wichita, a novel. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel & Leisure and Interview Magazine. He has a PhD in English Literature from Yale University and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the Associate Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY.