Nominated for the PEN/Hemingway Award For Debut Novel Finalist, and shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Maisy Card discusses her electric family saga These Ghosts are Family, a transporting debut novel that reveals the ways in which a Jamaican family forms and fractures over generations. She will be in conversation with Cherie Jones, author of the debut novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, one of the most anticipated books of 2021. Cherie will be speaking from her home in Barbados. Her book is an intimate and visceral portrayal of interconnected lives, across race and class, in a rapidly changing resort town.

Their conversation will be led by Tiphanie Yanique, an award-winning poet and author of Land of Love and Drowning .

Maisy Card was born in St. Catherine, Jamaica, but was raised in Queens, New York. She is currently an instructor for the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop and a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail.

Cherie S.A. Jones won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Archie Markham Award and the A.M. Heath Prize at Sheffield Hallam in the UK. A collection of interconnected stories set in a different small community in Barbados won a third prize at the Frank Collymore Endowment Awards in 2016.  She still works as a lawyer, in addition to her writing.

Ernesto Quiñonez, author of the landmark novel, Bodega Dreams, talks about his latest book, Taína, a uniquely dark, coming-of-age novel ripe with magical realism, music, sorcery and redemption, with a sweeping narrative. He will be joined by Pilar Fraile Amador, speaking from Spain, about her novel, Days of Euphoria (Días de euforia). She is considered by critics as one of the most cutting-edge voices of the Spanish literary scene. They will be joined by Spanish author Marta López-Luaces, a poet, writer and translator, and a professor at Montclair State University.

Ernesto Quiñonez is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, a Sundance fellow, and a Moth storyteller.  He was raised in Spanish Harlem and is a product of public education from kindergarten at PS 101 on 111th Street and Lex to his Masters at the City College of New York. He teaches English at Cornell University.

Pilar Fraile's publications include the novels Días de euforia, Las ventajas de la vida en el campo, the short stories collection Los nuevos pobladores, the nonfiction book Materiales para la ficción, de Poe a Fosters Wallace, and five poetry books. Some of her stories have been published in translation in The Paris Review, The Chicago Review, Conjunctions and The Brooklyn Rail.

Dubbed “the most popular poet in America,” Billy Collins is famous for conversational, witty poems that welcome readers with humor but often slip into quirky, tender, or profound observations on the everyday, reading and writing, and poetry itself. Collins’s level of fame is almost unprecedented in the world of contemporary poetry: his readings regularly sell out. He served two terms as the US poet laureate; his latest book of poems is Whale Day And Other Poems.

He will be joined by former UK Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. A poet, novelist and biographer, he was Poet Laureate in the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. He founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. Known for narrative poems that often take up historical events in a meditative mode, Motion’s poetry manages clarity of expression while hinting at turbulent or unresolved depths. He has said of his own work, “I want my writing to be as clear as water. I want readers to see all the way through its surfaces into the swamp." His latest collection of poems is titled, Randomly Moving Particles. He is the Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University.

“Pulitzer-winner Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction) [employs]…immersive journalism (which involves being hit by a jumping carp, observing coral sex, and watching as millennia-old ice is pulled from the ice sheets of Greenland) [to] make apparent the challenges of ‘the whole-earth transformation’ currently underway. This investigation of global change is brilliantly executed and urgently necessary.”—Publishers Weekly

Join Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart as he speaks with fellow Scot and award-winning actor, author, filmmaker, and activist Alan Cumming about his 2020 Booker Prize-winning debut novel Shuggie Bain on Sunday March 21 at 7 p.m. 

Shuggie Bain is a heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love. It follows the childhood of Hugh “Shuggie” Bain and his wayward, alchoholic mother Agnes, an epic portrayal of a working-class family in 1980s Glasgow. In naming Shuggie Bain the winner, the Booker Prize judges said: “We were bowled over by this first novel….It’s a desperately sad, almost-hopeful examination of family and the destructive powers of desire.”

Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the Booker Prize, and has been translated into 22 languages. He wrote Shuggie Bain over a ten-year period and is currently at work on his second novel, Loch Awe. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he has an MA from the Royal College of Art in London and since 2000 he has lived and worked in New York City.

Alan Cumming is a Scottish-American actor, writer, singer, filmmaker, and activist. He has won a Tony and hosted the Tonys; received multiple Golden Globe, Emmy and SAG award nominations; and is the author of six books including a #1 NYT bestselling Not My Father's Son and the upcoming memoir Baggage. He has received over 40 awards for his humanitarianism and social activism, three honorary doctorates, both the Great Scot and Icon of Scotland awards from his homeland and was made an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) for his contributions to the arts and LBGT equality.