The Muse 2013 | Presenter Bios

Marketplace Keynote Speaker: Amanda Palmer

Coming into public consciousness in 2002 with punk-cabaret troupe The Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer has heaved her way to the top of the music industry. Four albums and five tours later, she and her independent attitude went solo, releasing Who Killed Amanda Palmer, produced by Ben Folds, in 2008. Two self-released EP’s followed, along with a musical theater-esque Evelyn Evelyn album and tour with Jason Webley. Palmer has made a name for herself in the last few years as the quintessential social media artist, engaging in daily interactions with her fans 365 days a year and making an art form out of Twitter. With over half a million Twitter followers and a deeply personal blog, she has one of the most responsive and supportive online fan bases on the internet. Palmer made global headlines this year with her wildly successful Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, raising $1.2 million dollars for her new album, Theatre is Evil. Passion is what drives Amanda, and her success proves how determined she really is to make a difference not only in her own music, but in the way that music is created and consumed around the globe. Amanda Palmer has taken everything that was in her nimble-fingered grasp, from tweeted keytars to Melbourne coffees and the expansive grounds of the internet, and has woven them into a world first. This is the future of music, and Amanda Palmer is leading the way.

This event is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Muse Keynote Speaker: James Wood

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His critical essays have been collected in two volumes, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999) and The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a novel, The Book Against God (2003), and a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works (2008). He lives in Boston, and teaches half time at Harvard University, where he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism.

Guest Authors, Agents, Editors, Panelists, & Special Guests

Cara Blue Adams (Magazine Editor)

Cara Blue Adams is a writer and co-editor of The Southern Review. Her stories and nonfiction have appeared in Epoch, Narrative, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sun, and was recently named one of Narrative’s “15 Below 30.” She has been awarded grants from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the VCCA, together with The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize. Work she edited has appeared in or been named Notable by Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and other national publications. She lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

6K: Editors Tell All: Southern Review & Electric Literature & Slice

Steve Almond (Author)

Steve Almond is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently the story collection God Bless America. Learn more at stevealmondjoy.com.

1E: How Obsession Becomes Art: A Primer for Non-Fiction Writers

Miriam Altshuler (Literary Agent)

Miriam Altshuler established her own agency in 1994 after twelve years as an agent at Russell & Volkening. She focuses on literary commercial fiction and nonfiction, but most important to her are the quality of the writing and how the subject is approached. The range of fiction writers she represents includes Robb Forman Dew, National Book Award winner for Dale Loves Sophie to Death; Alice Lichtenstein; Joanna Catherine Scott; Donna Freitas and Kevin McIlvoy. Her nonfiction authors include Andrew Carroll, New York Times best-selling author of War Letters; Harriet Brown and her award winning memoir, Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle With Anorexia; Adina Hoffman, winner of the 2010 Wingate Literary Prize for My Happiness Bears No Relation To Happiness; Wednesday Martin; Janna Malamud Smith; and New York Times columnist, Alina Tugend. Miriam also represents wonderful writers of middle grade and young adult fiction, including our National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and the best-selling and award-winning author, Walter Dean Myers.

5L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Marilyn R. Atlas (Literary Manager & Producer)

An award-winning producer and personal manager with a longtime commitment to diversity, Marilyn R. Atlas is equally at home in the worlds of film, television, and live theater. Among her credits as a film producer are Real Women Have Curves for HBO, which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, A Certain Desire, starring Sam Waterston, and Echoes, which won the Gold Award at the 1991 Texas International Film Festival. She also co-produced the award-winning play To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday, which was made into a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Peter Gallagher, as well as Josefina Lopez’s successful debut of her play Detained in the Desert in San Antonio in the fall of 2012. She is partnered with Broadway producer Chris Bensinger for the musical version of Real Women Have Curves. She is currently developing the second YA novel by bestselling author Diana Lopez (Scholastic, July 2012) for a television movie. She has set up the client projects Untitled Posse Pilot to ABC Family, Bitterroot to Hallmark, and other scripts at Lifetime and Disney. She sold her clients’ (first-time) novels Chasing the Jaguar to HarperCollins, Hungry Woman in Paris to Grand Central Publishing, and The Ave Maria Bed & Breakfast to Hachette Publishing. She was recently featured in the book Write Now! from Tarcher Publishing. In addition, she has served as a guest speaker at various colleges and writer conferences around the country, helping aspiring writers and actors to develop their craft.

5H: Creating Memorable and Non-Stereotypical Characters

Bernadette Baker-Baughman (Literary Agent)

Bernadette Baker-Baughman (Victoria Sanders & Associates) is interested in representing Adult, YA, and middle grade fiction; commercial nonfiction; and graphic novels. In fiction she gravitates towards commercial work with a wide audience access point. Originality and plot driven concepts are key traits for fiction represented by Bernadette. She looks for high concept, edgy, quirky, strange, scary, funny, terrific, strange, smart, and startling work. She also loves thrillers, and is interested in books of any genre that explore, in a meaningful way, what it means to experience life as a human. Books that deftly dip into all of the magic, misery, pain, joy, lust, fear, hope, and nuance of life. In nonfiction she is looking for image-rich books, pop culture, art, quirky gift books, light sociology, and narrative nonfiction. In graphic novels she is seeking beautifully illustrated works of nonfiction, memoir, young adult fiction, and graphic literature.

Marianne Banks (Author)

Marianne Banks is the author of Growing up Delicious. Her first novel took 25 years to write with time off for smoking pot, coming out of the lesbian closet, and self doubt. She claims to be under-educated but could muddle through butchering a cow or stringing a barbed wire fence if she had to, though she hasn't found much use for that in the suburbs. She admits to being happy and as wonderful as that is she's not sure how much weight it carries. She is working on her second novel.

Option 11: How to Form a Peer-Led Writing and Manuscript Group

Stephen Barr (Literary Agent)

Stephen Barr spent the first 21 years of his life in Southern California, and the only thing he really knew about publishing before he moved to New York City was Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Terry Crabtree in Wonder Boys — he’s an editor, and he flies into Pittsburgh (wearing a big, comfy-looking east coast coat) to coax a second novel out of his troubled but probably brilliant author, and then come the hijinks. That sounded pretty swell, so Barr read Wonder Boys on the flight over to New York. Over the course of six or seven months of interviews and internships, he realized that he still wanted the coat and the authors, but would be more comfortable playing the role, so to speak, of their agent (though editing is perhaps his favorite thing in the whole wide world, and he works very closely with his clients to polish and perfect their manuscripts before and after submission). Barr landed at Writers House in 2008, became its biggest fan about four seconds later, started taking on his own clients in 2010 (serious non-fiction, memoir, literary fiction, picture books, non-paranormal YA, you name it), and just got his coat back from the dry cleaner.

3J: Query Lab

Lynne Barrett (Author)

Lynne Barrett is the author of the story collections The Secret Names of Women, The Land of Go and, most recently, Magpies, winner of the Florida Book Awards gold medal for general fiction. She has received the Edgar Allan Poe award of the Mystery Writers of America for best mystery story and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her recent work has been published in Blue Christmas, Real South, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Delta Blues, The Southern Women’s Review, Night Train, One Year to a Writing Life, and many other anthologies and journals. Editor of The Florida Book Review, she is a professor at Florida International University, where she teaches in the M.F.A. program. You can read more at lynnebarrett.com.

2C: A Beginner’s Guide to Plot

3D: Secrets and Lies

Ann Bauer (Author)

Ann Bauer is the author of two novels, The Forever Marriage (Overlook Press, 2012) and A Wild Ride Up The Cupboards (Scribner, 2005), as well as co-author of the culinary memoir Damn Good Food (Borealis, 2009). Her stories and essays have appeared in ELLE, Redbook, Salon, The Sun, The New York Times and the Washington Post. She writes from 6:30-9 most mornings.

6E: Writing Bootcamp: The No-Excuses Approach

Nichole Bernier (Author)

Nichole Bernier is author of the novel The Unfinished Work Of Elizabeth D. (Crown/Random House), a finalist for the 2012 New England Independent Booksellers Association fiction award, and has written for publications including Psychology Today, Salon, Elle, Self, Health, Redbook, Men’s Journal, Boston Magazine, and Post Road literary magazine. A contributing editor for Conde Nast Traveler for 14 years, she was previously on staff as the magazine’s golf and ski editor, columnist, and television spokesperson, and received her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. She is a founder of the literary blog Beyond the Margins, which publishes daily essays on the craft and business of writing. She is at work on her second novel and lives outside of Boston with her husband and five children. Nichole can be found online at nicholebernier.com and on Twitter @nicholebernier.

Option 7: How to Write a Query Letter

Option 8: Developing a Distinctive Voice on Social Media

Meredith Bernstein (Literary Agent)

Meredith Bernstein has been a literary agent for over 30 years. Prior to becoming a literary agent, she worked as a story editor for film producers on both the East and West Coasts, as well as a freelance reader. In addition to being a literary agent, Meredith Bernstein has packaged two romance lines and co-authored Sexual Chemistry with Julius Fast (M. Evans/Pocket). Her client list includes: fiction, both commercial and literary fiction (women’s and men’s); young adult fiction; mysteries and thrillers (series and standalone); and all genres of romance. In non-fiction: memoir; women's issues and health/medicine; parenting; psychology; business; spirituality and inspirational works; science; and travel. Regarding non-fiction, Meredith seeks authority written/driven works that shed new light on a given subject. She loves personal memoirs that bring out heroic individualism, and are further interested in writers of “special” projects and creative endeavors that supersede genre.

Meredith Bernstein also has been very successful in representing individuals who have accomplished memorable and outstanding achievements in their lives. Among such clients are Miep Gies (the woman who hid Anne Frank’s family and found her diary), Patricia Ireland, the former president of N.O.W., and Dennis Conner, of sailing fame. Most recently, David Carroll, a naturalist and environmental writer and illustrator, won the MacArthur Genius Award for his body work. He was also a finalist in the non-fiction category for the National Book Awards in 2009. ASSOCIATIONS: AAR; Sisters In Crime; and Author’s Guild. Meredith Bernstein has created and given an annual creative writing award to her alma mater, The University of Rochester.

Reginald Dwayne Betts (Author)

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two young sons. In 2012, President Barack Obama appointed Mr. Betts to the Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. An award-winning writer and poet, Mr. Betts’ memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for non-fiction. In 2010 he was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship to complete The Circumference of a Prison, a work of nonfiction exploring the criminal justice system. In addition, Mr. Betts is the author of a collection of poetry, Shahid Reads His Own Palm. In addition to his writing, Mr. Betts is involved in a number of non-profit organizations, including the Campaign for Youth Justice for which he serves as a national spokesperson. He received a B.A. from the University of Maryland and was recently a Radcliffe Fellow to Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies.

8D: Let Me Ask You A Question: Conducting Interviews for Non-Fiction

Sharon Bially (Special Guest)

Sharon Bially is the independent author of the novel Veronica’s Nap.  Vice President of the PR firm Farrell Kramer Communications, she also publicizes a select list of books.  She's is the Indie Alley book review editor at Reader Unboxed and a guest contributor to the award-winning blog Writer Unboxed. Visit Sharon's web site and blog at www.veronicas-nap.com.

Option 4: Strength in Numbers: The Power of Online Communities

L. Annette Binder (Author)

L. Annette Binder’s debut collection of stories, Rise (Sarabande Books), received the 2011 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction (selected by Laura Kasischke). Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Pushcart Prize XXXVI, One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review, Bellingham Review, Beloit Fiction Journal and others. One of her stories was performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts. She is currently at work on a novel based on her story “Dead Languages,” which appeared in The Southern Review.

Option 11: Successful Small Press Publishing: Author Perspective

Lane Shefter Bishop (Literary Manager & Producer)

Lane Shefter Bishop is a multi-award winning producer and director, receiving an Emmy, three Tellys, a Videographer Award, a Sherril C. Corwin Award, an Aurora, a New York Festivals Award, and the DGA Fellowship for Episodic Television. Currently, Ms. Bishop is CEO of Vast Entertainment - a book-to-screen company - with projects including the feature films Reboot (Peter Chernin Ent) for Fox, The Duff (McG/Wonderland) for CBS Films, and Hemlock (Akiva Goldsman/Weed Road); MOWs such as Operation Married By Christmas [LeAnn Rimes] with Dick Clark Productions for ABC Family; and television series including The Investigator with Fox TV Studios, and So Sue Me with Scott Stuber for NBC.

4E: Loglines: The Art of Selling Your Book in a Sentence

Megan Frazer Blakemore (Author)

Megan Frazer Blakemore is the author of the young adult novel Secrets of Truth & Beauty (2009), the middle grade novel The Water Castle (January 2013) and an upcoming, as yet untitled historical mystery. She earned her Master’s in Library Science from the Simmons Graduate School of Library & Information Science. She is a school librarian in Maine where she lives with her family. As a writer, she has researched turn of the century Arctic exploration, snake oil salesmen, and the care and raising of dairy goats.

Option 4: Going Beyond Google: Free and Easy Ways to Research

William Boggess (Literary Agent)

William Boggess began his career at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, before working at Barer Literary as the agency assistant until 2010. After leaving for two years to work on the editorial side at Little, Brown and Company, he is returning to represent literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, as well as provide editorial support for the agency's authors. He grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Lisa Borders (Author)

Lisa Borders' first novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, was chosen by Pat Conroy as the winner of River City Publishing's Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel and was published in 2002. Cloud Cuckoo Land also received fiction honors in the 2003 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her essay "Enchanted Night" was published in Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Lisa has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her short stories have appeared in Kalliope, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Newport Review and other journals. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Somerville Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and fellowships at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. More information on Lisa and her work is available at lisaborders.com.

4F: Essentials of the Novel

Eve Bridburg (Literary Agent)

Recently named one of Boston’s 50 most powerful women by Boston Magazine, Eve founded Grub Street in the spring of 1997. Her goal was to create a supportive yet rigorous place to study writing beyond the halls of academia. The experiment was a success from the beginning, convincing Eve that there was a great hunger in Boston for a literary arts center where emerging and established writers could inspire and teach students at all levels of development. She recruited an incredible group of instructors, staff, and board members; developed and oversaw strategy for growing the organization, and put in place the core values that remain essential to Grub Street today.

While remaining active as a Grub Street board member, Eve joined the Boston office of The Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary and Entertainment Agency in 2005. As a literary agent, she developed, edited, and sold a wide variety of books to major publishers including Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Grand Central, Abrams, and St. Martins. Her titles include Donovan Campbell’s New York Times Best Seller Joker One, Blogger Matt Logelin’s New York Times Best seller Two Kisses for Maddy, Kirsten Menger-Anderson’s critically acclaimed short story collection Doctor Olaf Van Schuler's Brain, and Len Rosen’s Edgar-nominated thriller All Cry Chaos. Eve also developed a list of expert-driven parenting, health, and spiritual titles by working closely with experts and collaborative writers in an effort to bring cutting edge thinking and research to trade audiences. Returning to Grub Street as Executive Director in April 2010, Eve’s mission has been to expand offerings to better educate and equip writers to take full advantage of the new opportunities ushered in by the digital age and to make Grub Street as dynamic by day as it is by night. Under her leadership, Grub Street has launched new innovative programming, planned a move and expansion in downtown Boston, grown enrollment by 60%, and actively engaged board members, donors, students, and members in our mission like never before.

Eve’s work leading Grub Street was recently recognized by the National Arts Strategies when they selected her to join their Chief Executive Program, a two-year initiative designed to unleash the collective power of 100 of the top executive leaders in the cultural sector to re-imagine the potential of cultural institutions and to figure out how they can contribute to civil society in the 21st century.

Eve has presented on publishing, the future of publishing, and on what it takes to build a literary arts center at numerous national conferences, including the Whidbey Island Writers Conference, The Sanibel Island Writers Conference, Writers at Work in Utah and AWP. Before starting Grub Street, Eve attended Boston University’s Writing program on a teaching fellowship, farmed in Oregon, ran an international bookstore in Prague and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with awards for academic excellence in Philosophy and Religion from Colgate University.

3H: The Strategic Writer: You’re Bigger Than Your Book

6L: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Jan Brogan (Author)

Jan Brogan, a journalist, essayist and writer of both novels and screenplays, is the author of the critically acclaimed Hallie Ahern series set in Providence. A Confidential Source (Mysterious Press, April 2005 ) which received a rave review in The New York Times Book Review and was chosen by The Mystery Guild Book Club as an alternate spring selection. Yesterday’s Fatal, published by St Martin’s Press in May, 2007, was named a “Killer Book” by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association and one of the summer’s best reads by Northeast Public Radio. Teaser, the final book in the series, received four stars from Romantic Times Magazine. Final Copy, her standalone, won the Drood Review of Mystery's Editors' Choice award and was a finalist in the Chesterfield Film project. A journalist for almost thirty years, Jan currently works as a correspondent for The Boston Globe. Her freelance work has appeared in Boston Magazine, The Improper Bostonian, Ladies Home Journal and Forbes Magazine. One of her humorous essays was published in the collection I’m Going to College, Not You, edited by Jennifer Delahunty. She has taught novel writing at The Brown University Learning Community, The Cape Cod Writer’s Center, The Learning Connection in Providence, RI, and at Providence Public Library. She is a member of the New England Crime Bake committee, and runs the manuscript critique program at their annual conference.

8G: How To Develop a Mystery Series Character

Regina Brooks (Literary Agent)

Regina Brooks is the founder and president of Serendipity Literary Agency LLC, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her agency has represented and established a diverse base of award-winning clients in adult and young adult fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. Her authors have appeared in USA Today, New York Times and the Washington Post as well as on Oprah, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSBNC, TV ONE, BET and a host of others. She has held senior editorial positions at John Wiley and Sons and McGraw-Hill companies. Brooks is the author of the titles Never Finished Never Done (Scholastic), Writing Great Books For Young Adults (Source Books), and You Should (Really) Write A Book: How To Write, Sell, And Market Your Memoir (St. Martin’s Press), has edited over nearly 100 titles and is a blogger for the Huffington Post and Essence.com. Brooks is also on the faculty of the Harvard University publishing course and the Whidbey Island Writers MFA program and annually teaches at more than twenty worldwide conferences. She has been highlighted in global media outlets including Forbes, Media Bistro, Essence magazine, Ebony magazine, Writer’s Digest magazine, The Writer, Jet, Rolling Out and Publisher’s Weekly. She also is a co-publisher of an imprint of Akashic called Open Lens.

4K: Industry Guide to Publishing: Non-Fiction

Michelle Brower (Literary Agent)

Michelle Brower is an agent with Folio Literary Management, where she focuses on literary fiction, women's fiction, some select commercial fiction, and narrative non-fiction. Previously, she was an agent with Wendy Sherman Associates, and she has a MA in English & American literature from NYU.

5L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Patrick Brown (Special Guest)

Patrick Brown serves as director of community for Goodreads, the largest book recommendation website in the world. Prior to heading up the Goodreads online community, Brown was an independent bookseller at Book Soup and Vroman's Bookstore. With an intense interest in group interaction online and a love for books, Patrick helps connect people with one another and with their passions. Currently Brown heads the Goodreads Author Program and Customer Care Team. He supports and cultivates one of the largest literary presences online by answering member questions and growing the Goodreads Community through social media, in-person outreach, and more.

Option 10: How to Leverage Goodreads

Jane Brox (Author)

Jane Brox’s fourth book, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of the year by Time magazine. She is the author of three previous books: Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm; Five Thousand Days Like This One, which was a 1999 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction; and Here and Nowhere Else, which won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She has received the New England Book Award for nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in many anthologies including Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has been awarded grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She has taught at Harvard University and Bowdoin College, and is currently on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Lesley University. She lives in Brunswick, Maine.

2D: Writing Over Time

Stace Budzko (Author)

Stace Budzko has been published or is forthcoming in Blip, Southeast Review, Versal, Upstreet, Necessary Fiction, Norton Anthology of Hint Fiction, Press 53, PANK, Hobart, elimae, The Los Angeles Review, Night Train, The Collagist, Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, Brevity & Echo, Quick Fiction and elsewhere. The screen adaptations of his stories have received numerous honors and showcases as well. At present, he is a writing instructor at Emmanuel College and writer-in-residence at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

8J: Flash/Film: Storytelling in the DIY Age

Kate Burak (Author)

Kate Burak is the author of Emily's Dress and Other Missing Things. Her short stories and poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, Fiction, Gettysburg Review and other places. She teaches writing at Boston University.

Option 6: YA Publishing: The Good, the Bad and the Reality

Susan Carlton (Author)

Susan Carlton’s latest novel, Love and Haight, has been nominated for ALA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults and the Amelia Bloomer Project for feminist fiction for kids and teens. She is also the author of the teen novel Lobsterland and a longtime writer for magazines, including Self, Elle, and Mademoiselle. She currently teaches at Boston University. She lives in Massachusetts with her family. Find Susan online at www.susancarlton.com.

Option 6: YA Publishing: The Good, the Bad and the Reality

Ellen Cassedy (Author)

Ellen Cassedy is the winner of the 2013 Grub Street National Book Prize for non-fiction for We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press). Her articles, essays, and translations have appeared in Hadassah, The Forward, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and other publications. She was a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and a speechwriter in the Clinton Administration. Recent awards include a Prakhin International Literary Foundation Award and, with Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, the 2012 Translation Prize awarded by the National Yiddish Book Center. Her “Tips of the Trade” advice for writers appears on www.shewrites.com. Visit her website at www.ellencassedy.com.

National Book Prize Reception, Reading, & Craft Discussion

4C: Up Close and Universal: The Balance of Big and Small in Memoir Writing

Christopher Castellani (Author)

Christopher Castellani is the author of three novels: All This Talk of Love, The Saint of Lost Things, and A Kiss from Maddalena, which won the 2004 Massachusetts Book Award. He is the artistic director of Grub Street, teaches every other semester in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, and for the fall 2013 term will be a visiting professor at Swarthmore College. He lives in Boston.

1C: Narrative Distance

C.C. Chapman (Author)

C.C. Chapman is the best-selling author of Amazing Things Will Happen. He is a photographer, speaker and humanitarian. His company The Cleon Foundation strives to make the world a better place through creativity. He is a graduate of Bentley University and lives in the woods outside of Boston.

1F: Becoming a Social Author: The Beginning

Chip Cheek (Author)

Chip Cheek's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Washington Square, Night Train, Quick Fiction, and Minnetonka Review, among other publications. His stories also appear in the current edition of the textbook What If: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter (Longman, 2009), and Brevity and Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories (Rose Metal Press, 2006). He is the recipient of a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award for 2011, as well as scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Summer Writers' Workshop. He is currently at work on a novel. 8F: Essentials of Character

Adam Chromy (Literary Agent)

After receiving a degree in Finance and Management from N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business and spending a decade as a sales and marketing guru for technology startups, Adam Chromy decided to blend his love of narrative with his modern entrepreneurial spirit. The result was Artists and Artisans, where for ten years he represented authors with a professional rigor seldom seen in the book business. After hundreds of published books and numerous bestsellers, Adam reorganized Artists and Artisans as a management company to better serve clients by offering them the higher visibility afforded by film and television adaptations of their work. After merging with Jason Ashlock’s Movable Type Literary Group to form Movable Type Management, Adam serves as President of Movable Type Media, managing a very exclusive list of authors, acting as Editor in Chief of TheRogueReader.com, while also developing and producing the screen adaptations of MTM’s clients’ work.

Dorie Clark (Author)

Dorie Clark, a former presidential campaign spokeswoman, is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and the American Management Association's publications. She is consultant and speaker for clients including Google, Yale University, and the World Bank, and is an adjunct professor of business administration at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of the Harvard Business Review Publishing book Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future.

Option 4: How to Build a Platform Publishers Can’t Resist

Ann Collette (Literary Agent)

Ann Collette was a freelance writer and editor before joining the Rees Literary Agency in 2000. Her list includes books by New York Times bestselling author B. A. Shapiro, Oprah's “Fall 2012 Unputdownable Mysteries” author Mark Pryor, Anthony Nominee Vicki Lane, RT Award Nominees Clay and Susan Griffith, Mark Russinovich, Steven Sidor, Carol Carr, and Chrystle Fiedler. She likes literary, mystery, thrillers, suspense, vampire, and commercial women's fiction; in non-fiction, she prefers narrative non-fiction, military and war, work to do with race and class, and work set in or about Southeast Asia. Ann does not represent children's, YA, sci-fi, or high fantasy.

7G: 12 Do’s and Don’t's of Mystery and Thriller Writing

Mary Cotton (Special Guest)

Mary Cotton is the co-owner of Newtonville Books in Newton, MA. She is a graduate of Williams College and holds an M.A. in English Literature from Boston University as well as an M.F.A. in creative writing from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She is the pseudonymous author of eleven novels for young adults, six of them New York Times bestsellers. She is also a former managing editor and current fiction editor for the literary magazine Post Road, and is co-editor of No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road and, with Dennis Lehane, of Boston Noir 2: The Classics.

8L: The Changing Landscape of Women’s Fiction

Karen Day (Author)

Karen Day is the award-winning author of three novels for middle school readers, No Cream Puffs, Tall Tales and A Million Miles From Boston, all published by Random House. Her novels have appeared on numerous lists, including Bank Street College Educator's Best Books of the Year and the Texas Library Associations Bluebonnet Master reading list. Karen teaches writing workshops to both children and adults. She has been on the faculty at the Cape Cod Writers Center Conference and will be teaching next summer at the Chautauqua Writers' Center. You can reach Karen at her website: klday.com

4G: Creating Believable Points of View in Novels for Kids

Matt Dellinger (Editor)

Matt Dellinger joined Byliner as their first Content Director in 2012. He worked for ten years on staff at The New Yorker as an illustrations editor, multimedia editor, and the producer and host of The New Yorker Out Loud, the magazine's first weekly podcast. At The New Yorker, Matt oversaw editorial projects such as the launch (and relaunch) of Newyorker.com, The Complete New Yorker archive, and the staff softball team. More recently, Matt worked as Director of the Vogue Digital Archive project, the most ambitious effort of its kind to date. Matt has written for The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Oxford American, the Wall Street Journal magazine, Popular Science, and The New York Times, and has reported on transportation and planning on and off the air at WNYC. He is the author of Interstate 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway, published by Scribner in 2010.

2F: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part I

Option 6: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part II

4L: Literary Idol: Fiction Focus

Michael Dickes (Author)

Michael Dickes is Chief Editor of Awkward Paper Cut, a resource showcasing and connecting industry reps with new or unknown film, literary, art, and musical talent. The New York City-based writer, composer and film maker has licensed his songs in film, television, and radio. His stories have been featured in Thrice Fiction Magazine, Southpaw Journal, and Kerouac’s Dog Magazine, among others. For more go to michaeldickes.weebly.com.

8J: Flash/Film: Storytelling in the DIY Age

Erika Dreifus (Author)

Erika Dreifus is the author of Quiet Americans: Stories, which is a 2012 ALA Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title (for outstanding Jewish literature). A veteran of conferences and residences, and a seasoned contest entrant, Erika publishes a free monthly e-newsletter, The Practicing Writer, for poets, fictionists, and writers of creative nonfiction. Please visit her website for more information and writing resources: www.erikadreifus.com.

8K: Grubbie Guide to Writing Contests, Conferences & Residencies

April Eberhardt (Literary Agent)

A self-described "literary change agent," April Eberhardt assists and advises authors as they navigate the increasingly complex world of publishing. As readers and publishers choose among the many ways literature is being delivered in the new millennium, authors need a literary agent who understands both the traditional and electronic marketplaces, along with the evolving options for agent-assisted independent publishing. April works with serious authors who recognize the need for professional support, and the importance of publishing in the highest-quality way, be it traditionally or independently. Agent-vetted manuscripts help independently-published authors stand out from the millions of others, and contribute to raising the bar for independent publishing, garnering recognition and sales for those authors who understand and commit to "self-publishing, done right."

6H: The New Era of Publishing: An Agent’s Perspective on Going the Indie Route

Hannah Elnan (Editor)

Hannah Elnan grew up in Ohio and California, and received a BA in Creative Writing from Oberlin College, where she worked at Oberlin College Press. Before joining Ballantine Bantam Dell in 2011, Hannah also worked at Elyse Cheney Literary Associates for several years. While at Ballantine Bantam Dell, Hannah has worked closely with colleagues and their award-winning and bestselling authors. Among others, she has worked with Jon Katz, most recently on his New York Times bestselling eBook memoir The Story of Rose, Pulitzer finalist Jonathan Dee on his forthcoming novel, NYT bestselling author of The Middle Place, Lift Kelly Corrigan on her forthcoming memoir, and “Parenthood” and “Gilmore Girls” star Lauren Graham on her forthcoming novel. She is particularly interested in acquiring upmarket and literary debut fiction with strong female voices as well as narrative nonfiction on such topics as popular science, medicine, psychology, humor, gender issues and food.

6L: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Elizabeth Evans (Literary Agent)

Elizabeth Evans is a literary agent at the Jean V. Naggar Agency, where she has worked since 2010. Previously, she worked for six years in the San Francisco Bay Area with Kimberley Cameron & Associates. She represents a robust nonfiction list and a small but dynamic list of novelists. Elizabeth graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hamilton College with a degree in English literature and received an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. She credits her parents with inspiring her love of books from an early age. Elizabeth especially loves launching new authors' careers and works closely with her clients to fine-tune their proposals and manuscripts. She is the founder of Room to Write, a volunteer group of over eighty New York City publishing professionals.

5K: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Sorche Fairbank (Literary Agent)

Since establishing Fairbank Literary Representation in 2002, Sorche Elizabeth Fairbank has had the pleasure of working with a dynamic and varied list, representing best-selling authors, Edgar recipients, award-winning journalists, and of course one of her favorite kinds of client – the debut author. Tastes in novels tend toward literary fiction, international voices, and women’s voices. On the nonfiction side, books that tackle current events and topical and societal issues with a narrative treatment. She has a strong interest in women’s voices and class and race issues, quality lifestyle books (food, wine, design), memoir that goes beyond the me-moir, and humor, gift books, and pop culture. Subjects and genres not of interest by Sorche and Fairbank Literary include: sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal, children’s and YA, self-help, romance, and sports fiction. Also, anything that opens with a dream scene and/or exhaustive descriptions of weather. Unless, of course, it’s really, really, really good. Authors and books represented by Fairbank Literary include: O. Henry Prize winner Charlotte Forbes; Pulitzer nominee and LA Times Cairo Bureau Chief Jeffrey Fleishman; Edgar winner Rex Burns, Matthew Frederick and his best-selling 101 Things I Learned series; Eudora Welty prize winner Miroslav Penkov (East of the West), Travis Bradford, CEO of Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room (Solar Revolution); Jonathan McCullough’s A Tale Of Two Subs: An Untold Story Of World War II, Two Sister Ships, And Extraordinary Heroism; Robert McKinnon, (Legacy: Keeping Our Promise for a Better World); essays by such luminaries as Jimmy Carter, Bill McKibben, Mia Hamm, and Dave Eggers; and essayist Jessica Handler. Humor and gift book clients include Chuck Sambuchino (How To Survive a Garden Gnome Attack; Red Dog, Blue Dog), Terry Border (Bent Objects Empire), and Carl Warner (Carl Warner’s Food Landscapes). For updated information on Sorche Fairbank and Fairbank Literary, their clients, and recent deals: www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/SorcheFairbank.

1G: How To Talk to Agents: Part I

2G: How To Talk to Agents: Part 2

3J: Query Lab

4L: Literary Idol: Fiction Focus

Juliette Fay (Author)

Juliette Fay’s latest novel is The Shortest Way Home, and it was recently chosen by Library Journal as one of five Best Books 2012: Women’s Fiction. Her first novel, Shelter Me, was a 2009 Massachusetts Book Award “Must-Read Book,” a Target Bookmark Club selection, and on the American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next list. Her second, Deep Down True, was short-listed for the Women’s Fiction award by the American Library Association. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and four children. When she’s not trying to keep track of her kids or daydreaming about her next story, Juliette can be reached on her website: juliettefay.com; Facebook: Juliette Fay, author; and Twitter @juliettefay.

8L: The Changing Landscape of Women’s Fiction

Joseph Finder (Author)

Joseph Finder is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels whom the Boston Globe has called a “master of the modern thriller.” His most recent book, Buried Secrets, is the second to feature “private spy” Nick Heller. His first novel, The Moscow Club, was named by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best spy novels of all time. Killer Instinct was named Best Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers, and a major motion picture based on Paranoia is schedule to premiere this October, starring Harrison Ford, Gary Oldman and Liam Hemsworth. His novel High Crimes became a hit movie starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, he lives in Boston.

6G: Learning from Breaking Bad

Jon P. Fine (Special Guest)

Jon P. Fine is director of Author & Publisher Relations for Amazon.com, focusing on Amazon’s publishing programs and author services, and coordinating outreach to the author and publishing communities, including Amazon’s author giving program for non-profit literary organizations. He joined the company as associate general counsel for media and copyright in January 2006, and subsequently led business development for Brilliance Audio following its acquisition by Amazon in 2007. Prior to Amazon, he served as VP and Associate General Counsel for Random House, Inc., where he directed legal affairs for the Alfred A. Knopf division as well as for Random House of Canada. He previously served as Senior Media Counsel at NBC, handling content and associated issues for NBC News, Saturday Night Live, and other divisions; as counsel at King World Productions for Inside Edition and other programming; and as a litigation associate at Debevoise & Plimpton, where he focused on copyright, libel, internet and other media-related matters. He is a graduate of Cornell University and of the University of Virginia School of Law. Following law school, he served as Judicial Clerk for United States District Judge Sam C. Pointer, Jr.

2E: How Writers Can Get the Most From Amazon

4J: The Web Wants You: Online Opportunities for Writers

Katherine Flynn (Literary Agent)

Katherine Flynn joined the Kneerim, Williams & Bloom Agency in 2008. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, Katherine worked at the literary agency of Sanford J. Greenburger Associates in New York. She then pursued her PhD in History at Brown University, where she is now A.B.D. She has also taught literature and composition to high school students and worked in a rare book shop. Katherine represents history, biography, politics/current affairs, adventure, science, nature, pop culture, and psychology for non-fiction and particularly loves exciting narrative nonfiction, where the truth is a story more fascinating than anything else. For fiction, she represents both literary and commercial fiction, and she is fond of urban or foreign locales, crime novels, insight into women’s lives, biting wit, and historical settings. That said, some of her favorite novels would probably not fit any of these descriptors, and she is open to anything that is well-written and contains a compelling, fresh story.

7L: Literary Idol: Fiction & Non-Fiction

Matthew Frederick (Author)

Matthew Frederick began his writing career as the architecture columnist for The Harrisburg Patriot-News before authoring one of the bestselling architecture books of all time, 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School (MIT Press, 2007). He subsequently created the 101 Things I Learned series, for which he is editor and illustrator and which to date has produced four additional bestsellers in Business, Culinary Arts, Fashion and Film. Mr. Frederick maintains an active practice in architecture and urban design and speaks frequently on architecture, urbanism, and writing.

Option 3: What’s the Big (Or Little) Idea?

Maria Gagliano (Editor)

Maria Gagliano a senior editor at Portfolio, Current, and Sentinel. She began her career at Random House and joined Penguin in 2006 as an editor for Perigee and Prentice Hall Press. She has since helped launch the careers of several first-time authors in the business world, the food world, and beyond. Notable business titles include The Art of Non-Conformity by New York Times bestselling author Chris Guillebeau and Hacking Your Education by Thiel Fellow Dale Stephens; on the food side, notable titles include The Naked Pint, The Naked Brewer, Handwritten Recipes, The Lost Arts of Hearth & Home, and The Lost Art of Real Cooking. Maria is also a co-founder and business director of Slice, a nonprofit literary organization dedicated to bridging the gap between emerging writers and the publishing world. Slice was launched in 2007 with a semi-annual literary magazine that is now in its 12th issue. Slice hosts an annual writers’ conference that brings together more than 200 writers, editors, and agents from the book community in the spirit of helping new writers have their voices heard. Slice has been featured in Time Out New York, the New Yorker, the New York Times, and Poets & Writers. When her nose isn’t in a book or magazine, Maria enjoys baking, beer brewing, and porch sitting.

6K: Editors Tell All: Southern Review & Electric Literature & Slice

Amy Gash (Editor)

Amy Gash is a Senior Editor in the New York office of Algonquin Books, where she has acquired literary fiction and narrative nonfiction for the past fifteen years. Among the books she has edited are Ariel Sabar’s My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Family’s Past, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, and the New York Times bestsellers Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising School in America by Jay Mathews and the novel The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro, and Audubon Medal recipient Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Other bestselling titles include The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker by Janet Groth, Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year by Esme Raji Codell, The $64 Tomato: How One Man Nearly Lost His Sanity, Spent a Fortune, and Endured an Existential Crisis in the Quest for the Perfect Garden by William Alexander, and A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance by Marlena de Blasi. Forthcoming are a memoir about learning cello in mid-life, a history of a 1930s Ponzi scheme, a story about the making of a dictionary, and a thriller detailing the search for an ancient Bible. What connects all her diverse projects, whether fiction, memoir, history, education, travel, religion, science, or popular culture is the author’s distinct voice. Before arriving at Algonquin, Amy worked at HarperCollins and Random House. Her own book, What the Dormouse Said: Lessons for Grown-ups from Children’s Books, was published in 1999.

6L: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Sarah Gerkensmeyer (Author)

Sarah Gerkensmeyer’s story collection, What You Are Now Enjoying, was selected by Stewart O’Nan as winner of the 2012 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and the Italo Calvino Prize for Fabulist Fiction, Sarah has received scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Ragdale, Grub Street, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her stories have appeared in Guernica, The New Guard, The Massachusetts Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Cream City Review, among others. Sarah is the 2012-13 Pen Parentis Fellow. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University and now teaches creative writing at State University of New York at Fredonia.

Option 11: Successful Small Press Publishing: Author Perspective

Ethan Gilsdorf (Author)

Ethan Gilsdorf is a journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, and author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, and wired.com. Ethan has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including BoingBoing, CNN.com, Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Fodor's travel guides. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe, film columnist for Art New England, and a core contributor to the blog "GeekDad" at wired.com, and his blog "Geek Pride" is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com. Read more at www.ethangilsdorf.com.

2B: Charting the Non-Fiction Writing Career

6L: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Andrew Goldstein (Panelist)

In 1958 I was 10 years old and I started taking bets for my father, a bookie in the Bronx. When I was 25 I was an organic orange and olive farmer in California when my first book was published and I was selected as a Breadloaf Fellow. I started writing The Bookie's Son. Five years later I was still working on the novel when I froze a Zamboni to the ice in the middle of a hockey game. I was fired. I read the book, Match Play and the Spin of The Ball and taught myself tennis. Not a great player but a good teacher I became the head tennis pro at a tennis club in the Berkshires and kept writing in-between lessons. When I was 32 my first child was born and we needed money so I gave up writing and became a custom builder. Two decades later I was named the National Custom Builder of the Year. Kids grown, I started writing again. Hey, I like this, I said. Took writing workshops at Grub Street and in May 2012 after 40 on and off years of writing The Bookie's Son, it was published by SixOneSeven Books. In September I joined forces with Michelle Toth and became a partner at SixOneSeven. In May 2013 we will publish our first joint venture, Girls I Know, a novel by O. Henry winner and Penn/Hemingway finalist Douglas Trevor.

5J: Small Press, Big Time: The Writer’s Guide to Publishing with an Indie Press

Lynne Griffin (Author)

Lynne Griffin is the author of the novels Sea Escape (Simon & Schuster) and Life Without Summer (St. Martin’s Press), and the nonfiction parenting guide, Negotiation Generation (Penguin). In addition to teaching at Grub Street, Lynne teaches in the graduate program of family studies at Wheelock College. She is the family life contributor for Boston’s Fox Morning News and writes for The Writer magazine, Parenting magazine, and Psychology Today. For more about Lynne’s work, visit her website, www.LynneGriffin.com or her blog, Field Guide to Families.

7K: A Logical Approach To a Successful Book Launch

Robert E. Guinsler (Literary Agent)

Robert E. Guinsler has been with SLL for over ten years and his primary interests include literary and commercial fiction (including YA), journalism, narrative nonfiction with an emphasis on pop culture, science and current events, memoirs and biographies. Robert’s clients include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, novelists and academics. With a journalism background, Robert is interested in all kinds of nonfiction subjects and he has represented such authors as New York Times-bestselling author and Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, Adam Bradley, Mark Kurzem, NPR Baghdad bureau chief Quil Lawrence, Wendy Lawless, J.R. Martinez, Jason Stearns, Chelsea Lately writer and New York Times-bestselling author Sarah Colonna, and Charles London. Robert’s interest in fiction includes literary and commercial fiction, as well as young adult and middle grade. His fiction writers include Samantha Peale, Vanina Marsot, Barnes and Noble Discover pick Doug Crandell, and Grant Jerkins, among others. Additionally, Robert represents the Estate of Jack Kerouac and the Estate of Anne Sexton.

Jane Hamilton (Author)

Jane Hamilton’s novels have won literary prizes, been made into films, have been international best-sellers, and two of them, The Book of Ruth, and A Map of The World, were selections of Oprah’s Book Club. She’s married to an apple farmer and lives in Wisconsin. Her seventh novel, The Boy Who Could Do Anything, will be published in April of 2014.

5A: The Art of Listening to Your Own Work, with Tips from Jane Austen

Esmond Harmsworth (Literary Agent)

Esmond Harmsworth is a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. Born in London, he was educated in England before graduating magna cum laude from Brown University and cum laude from Harvard Law School. Harmsworth is always interested in nonfiction books filled with rich ideas or based on strong narrative stories. He is looking hard for literary food writing, for interesting science writing, for serious new writing on religion and spirituality, and for quirky narrative stories and biographies. As far as fiction goes, he is first and foremost searching for beautifully written prose, rich, descriptive writing and good characters. He does not represent any poetry.

7L: Literary Idol: Fiction & Non-Fiction

Erin Harris (Literary Agent)

Erin Harris is a literary agent at Folio Literary Management. She represents literary fiction, book club fiction, contemporary YA, and select narrative non-fiction titles. Some of her clients include: Time magazine contributor and former Newsweek correspondent Carla Power, Executive Editor of The New Criterion David Yezzi, and the novelists Bryan Furuness and Jennifer Laam. Erin began her career in publishing in 2008 and has worked for both William Clark of WM Clark Associates and Irene Skolnick of the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and her BA in literature from Trinity College (Hartford, CT).

4L: Literary Idol: Fiction Focus

Kerry Herlihy (Author)

Kerry Herlihy is a writer and teacher living in southern Maine. Her essays have appeared in multiple publications, including The New York Times' column, Modern Love and Good Housekeeping. She has contributed to several anthologies including The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth about Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage and Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women About Mothers and Daughters. In addition, her story has been featured on BBC’s program Witness. She is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program. Currently, she is finishing a memoir about unconventional motherhood and adoption.

Option 5: In Pursuit of Truth: Why Writers Need to Fail

Ann Hood (Author)

Ann Hood is the author, most recently, of The Obituary Writer, as well as the bestselling novels, The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was a New York Times' editor’s choice, and was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008. She has won Best American Spiritual Writing, Travel Writing, and Food Writing awards, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction.

4B: How to Be Your Own Best Editor

Option 9: Women (Writers) of a Certain Age

6C: Ten Steps to a Kickass Essay

Michelle Hoover (Author)

Michelle Hoover is a full-time instructor at Boston University and has published short stories and novel excerpts in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, StoryQuarterly and Confrontation. She has been the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell, a MacDowell Fellow, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published in Best New American Voices. Her novel, The Quickening, was published by Other Press in June 2010. It has been shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and is a Finalist for the Indies Choice Debut of 2010. Learn more at www.michelle-hoover.com.

4F: Essentials of the Novel

Tim Horvath (Panelist)

Tim Horvath is the author of Understories, published in 2012 by Bellevue Literary Press, and Circulation, a novella released by sunnyoutside press (2009). His stories have appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, Fiction, The Normal School, and elsewhere. His story “The Understory” was selected by Bill Henderson, founder and president of the Pushcart Press, as the winner of the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. He teaches creative writing in the BFA program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art and at Grub Street, and has previously worked as a counselor in a psychiatric hospital, primarily with adolescents and children and young adults with autism. He is the recipient of a Yaddo Fellowship, occasionally blogs for BIG OTHER, and is an assistant prose editor for Camera Obscura.

5J: Small Press, Big Time: The Writer’s Guide to Publishing with an Indie Press

Stuart Horwitz (Author)

Stuart Horwitz founded Book Architecture after an astrologer told him his work would flourish “behind the scenes.” He is an award-winning poet and essayist, and the front man for the band Art Don’t Pay. He holds two Masters degrees—one in Literary Aesthetics from NYU, which helps him a lot with this work—- and one in East Asian Studies from Harvard with a concentration in Medieval Japanese Buddhism, which helps him get out of bed in the morning.

Option 5: The First Draft is the Easy Part: Revision Demystified

Carrie Howland (Literary Agent)

Carrie Howland is a literary agent at Donadio and Olson, Inc., where she represents literary fiction and narrative non-fiction. In addition to her own clients, she handles foreign, first serial, and audio rights for the agency. Carrie is a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives and writes for its newsletter. She speaks at various writing conferences throughout the year and also volunteers annually as a judge for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Carrie holds a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Albion College, where she was the Poetry Editor of The Albion Review. Her poetry has appeared in various literary journals and magazines. In her spare time, Carrie volunteers as a foster for a local dog rescue. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can follow her on twitter at @ecarriehowland or learn more about Donadio & Olson at www.donadio.com.

Emi Ikkanda (Editor)

Emi Ikkanda, an editor at Times Books and Henry Holt & Company, is building a list of narrative nonfiction, memoir, and fiction. Her list includes Time Magazine contributor Carla Power’s forthcoming book If The Oceans Were Ink. Emi has worked on the publication of books by award-winning and bestselling authors including president Jimmy Carter, Booker Prize-winner John Banville, Pulitzer-Prize winners Tony Horwitz and Annette Gordon-Reed, Richard North Patterson, Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, Lauren Manning, executive editor of The New York Times Jill Abramson, and New York Times reporters Elaine Sciolino and Diana Henriques. Before joining Holt, she was an associate editor at the Berkeley Fiction Review and worked at the University of California Press. She has earned degrees in art and literature at U.C. Berkeley and King’s College London, and studied abroad at the American University of Paris. Emi pursues nonfiction narratives, histories, memoirs, and reportage that explore race, war, multiculturalism, adventure, science, food, and the arts. She is also seeking multicultural or historical novels, WWII noirs, and voice driven fiction. She is drawn to emotionally rich stories that center on family secrets or on a fascinating friendship or marriage, and she is always drawn to characters that are artists or creative types. In fiction or nonfiction, she loves discovering a lost chapter in history, going on a journey, and exploring hidden worlds.

4K: Industry Guide to Publishing: Non-Fiction

Sheri Joseph (Author)

Sheri Joseph was the inaugural winner of the Grub Street Book Prize in Fiction for her novel Stray (MacAdam/Cage 2007). Her latest novel, Where You Can Find Me (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, April 2013), was awarded a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for its first chapter. Her first book was a story cycle, Bear Me Safely Over (Grove/Atlantic 2002), a two-time Book Sense selection. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Kenyon Writers’ Workshop, The Hambidge Center, the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, The Anderson Center, VCCA, The MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. A resident of Atlanta, she teaches in the creative writing program at Georgia State University and serves as fiction editor of Five Points.

5E: The Post-Climax Beginning

8K: Grubbie Guide to Writing Contests, Conferences & Residencies

Meredith Kaffel (Literary Agent)

Meredith Kaffel, formerly an agent with the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency, joined DeFiore and Company in early 2012. She represents and is seeking arresting new voices across a spectrum of genres, from adult fiction (literary debut, literary with speculative or thriller elements, smart women’s fiction, and book club fiction) and narrative nonfiction to platform-driven pop culture & prescriptive, comic illustrators, and books for children. What ties together Meredith’s varied list is her sensibility, which tends, across genres, toward the quirky, the romantic, the incredible, the brave, the poetically tragic, the dark, the hilarious, the obsessive, the emotionally complicated, the wondrous and astounding – those books which render the ordinary extraordinary and the extraordinary somehow relatable and within reach – books full of heart and smarts both. Prior to joining the publishing world, Meredith earned her B.A. in Renaissance Studies at Yale, where she focused primarily on Italian Renaissance art history, architecture and literature. You can follow Meredith on Twitter at @mere215.

Daphne Kalotay (Author)

Daphne Kalotay is the author of the award-winning novel Russian Winter, which has been published in 20 languages, the forthcoming novel Sight Reading (HarperCollins 2013), and the fiction collection Calamity and Other Stories, which was short-listed for the Story Prize. A MacDowell Fellow, Daphne holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Literature and an MA in Creative Writing and has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She has taught at Boston University, Skidmore College, Middlebury College, and Grub Street, and is co-president of the Boston chapter of the Women’s National Book Association. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More information at www.daphnekalotay.com or www.facebook.com/DaphneKalotay.

8L: The Changing Landscape of Women’s Fiction

Pagan Kennedy (Panelist)

Pagan Kennedy writes a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine called "Who Made That." The author of ten books, she has published with Viking Press, Simon & Schuster, Bloomsbury and others. Several of her books have been optioned by filmmakers. In 2010, she was awarded a fellowship at the MIT Knight Science Journalism Center; her journalism has appeared in the NY Times Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine, Details, The Village Voice, Boston Magazine, the NY Times Book Review and other venues. She has taught at Boston College, Warren Wilson, and Dartmouth College. This year, she is co-instructor (with Ethan Gilsdorf) of the Grub Street Nonfiction Career Lab.

5K: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Crystal King (Author)

Crystal King is a freelance writer and Pushcart-nominated poet who is currently seeking representation for her first novel. She holds an MA in Critical & Creative Thinking from UMass Boston where she centered her thesis on developing a system to help fiction writers in progress. An 18 year marketing and communications veteran, Crystal currently drives social media for Keurig, the leading coffeemaker brand in the US. She has taught classes in writing, creativity and social media at Harvard Extension School, Boston University, Mass College of Art and UMass Boston. Find her on Twitter at @crystallyn and on Google+ at gplus.to/crystallyn.

3L: Essentials of Social Media

Nicole Lamy (Panelist)

Nicole Lamy is the books editor of the Boston Globe. She has worked as an editor for the Harvard Review, Transition Magazine, and the Boston Book Review. Some of her essays and criticism have appeared in the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix, the New York Sun, and the American Scholar.

7J: How to Catch the Reviewer’s Eye

Ann Leary (Author)

Ann Leary is the author of the memoir An Innocent, A Broad and the novels Outtakes From a Marriage and The Good House. She has written fiction and nonfiction for various magazines and is a co-host of the NPR weekly radio show Hash Hags.

Option 1: Your First Page: Friend or Foe?

Dick Lehr (Author)

Dick Lehr is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is co-author of the new biography of gangster James J "Whitey" Bulger Whitey: The Life of America's Most Notorious Gangster; author of The Fence: A Police Cover-up Along Boston's Racial Divide, which was a finalist in the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best non-fiction, and co-author of several other bestselling books. Lehr is a former investigative, legal affairs and magazine writer for the Boston Globe, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting and won numerous national and regional public service journalism awards.

1D: Telling the Tough Tale

Sarah Levitt (Literary Agent)

Sarah Levitt joined The Zoë Pagnamenta Agency in 2010. She is interested in the space between fiction and non-fiction; fiction so informed that it reads like non-fiction, non-fiction so enthralling and far-reaching that it feels like novel. For non-fiction, she is looking for biography, cultural history, memoir, science, “ideas” books, and narrative non-fiction. For fiction, she is looking for imaginative, voice-driven narrative that demands a reaction (that does something) or fiction so well-crafted that the doing is done in each sentence (think: Michel Houellebecq, Jamal Mahjoub, Geoff Dyer, and Jennifer Egan). The Zoë Pagnamenta Agency is a boutique literary agency with a particular focus on literary fiction and serious non-fiction. Their US clients include Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of the prize-winning When Skateboards Will Be Free, Tom Vanderbilt, author of NYT bestseller Traffic, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Wayne Biddle; historians Louis P. Masur and Alice Kessler-Harris; novelists Rosie Dastgir, Alice Mattison, and Dirk Wittenborn; and narrative non-fiction writers Tom Folsom, Brendan I. Koerner, and Andrew Blum. The agency also works closely with several UK agencies and represents a number of writers in the US and Canada on their behalf, from Hisham Matar and Alan Bennett to Anthony Horowitz, David Almond, Meg Rosoff, and Edmund de Waal, author of the NYT bestselling family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes (winner of the 2010 Costa Biography of the Year award and the 2011 Ondaatje Prize).

7L: Literary Idol: Fiction & Non-Fiction

Kelly Link (Editor)

Kelly Link is the author of three collections, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. She is also the co-founder, with Gavin J. Grant, of Small Beer Press. Together they produce the zine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and have co-edited a number of anthologies, including The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martins), and the forthcoming Monstrous Affections (Candlewick).

5J: Small Press, Big Time: The Writer’s Guide to Publishing with an Indie Press

Elinor Lipman (Author)

Elinor Lipman is the author of 10 works of fiction, including The Family Man, My Latest Grievance, The Inn at Lake Devine, and Then She Found Me. She had been a judge for the National Book Awards and the National Endowment for the Arts, and holds the Elizabeth Drew Chair in Creative Writing at Smith College. Her next two books, The View From Penthouse B and a collection of personal essays, will be published in 2013.

2F: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part I

Option 6: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part II

Option 9: Women (Writers) of a Certain Age

Ellen Litman (Author)

Ellen Litman is the author of The Last Chicken in America, a finalist for the 2007 LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the 2008 New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has appeared in Best New American Voices, Best of Tin House, and elsewhere. In 2006 she received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. A native of Moscow, she immigrated to the US in 1992. She currently teaches at the University of Connecticut, where she is a co-director of the Creative Writing program.

8A: Novel In Stories: What Makes It a Novel?

Yael Goldstein Love (Panelist)

Yael Goldstein Love is the co-founder and Editorial Director of Plympton, a digital literary studio, and author of the novels Overture (Doubleday, 2007) and The Passion of Tasha Darksy (Broadway Books, 2008), which are actually the same novel.

4J: The Web Wants You: Online Opportunities for Writers

Michael Lowenthal (Author)

Michael Lowenthal's fourth novel, The Paternity Test, was an October 2012 IndieNext List selection. His previous novels are The Same Embrace, Avoidance, and Charity Girl, which was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” title and Washington Post “Top Fiction of 2007” pick. He has taught at Boston College and Hampshire College, and since 2003 has been on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA program in creative writing. He lives in Boston.

7J: How to Catch the Reviewer’s Eye

Ron MacLean (Author)

Ron MacLean is the author of the story collection Why the Long Face? (2008) and the novel Blue Winnetka Skies (2004). His fiction has appeared in GQ, Greensboro Review, Fiction International and many more publications. He is a recipient of the Frederick Exley Award for Short Fiction and a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee. He holds a Doctor of Arts from the University at Albany, SUNY, and is a former executive director at Grub Street, Boston’s independent creative writing center, where he still teaches. His literary thriller, Headlong, will be released in September.

Option 11: Successful Small Press Publishing: Author Perspective

Steve Macone (Author)

Steve Macone studied journalism at Boston University and is a contributor at The Onion. His essays, humor writing and reporting have appeared in The American Scholar, Atlantic Online, New Yorker, Boston Globe, Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Phoenix, Salon.com, New York Times, Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, The Drum, The Weekly Dig, and AOL News. He's been featured on NPR and had a story about playing with action figures named a "notable essay" in the Best American Essays series. His writing has been featured on The Daily Beast, Longreads.com, and The New Yorker site's "to read" section.

Option 3: Submitting Your Work: A Strategic Plan for the Next Step

Karyn Marcus (Editor)

Karyn Marcus acquires projects over a wide range of fiction and nonfiction. Authors she has worked with include Jeffrey Toobin, Tina Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Kitty Kelley, Sally Jenkins, Guy Lawson, Sharon Begley, Hugh Howey, Ayelet Waldman, Linda Fairstein, Madeleine Wickham, and Sara Bareilles. At Simon & Schuster, she is seeking well-plotted suspense fiction, particularly novels with a psychological or speculative slant. In nonfiction, she is consistently surprised by the topics which pique her interest, but must-haves include literary memoir, science for the layperson, books about the brain, subcultures, and social trends. Above all, stories which highlight dignity in the face of great challenges keep her turning pages. Previously, Karyn worked at Brickhouse Literary Agency, Doubleday and Thomas Dunne Books.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (Author)

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is writing a book of combined family memoir and literary journalism about a Louisiana murder, in support of which she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA at Emerson College and her JD at Harvard Law School. Her essays appear in The New York Times, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, TriQuarterly Online, Bellingham Review (as the winner of the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction), and elsewhere, and her fiction appears in Southeast Review and Minnetonka Review. She teaches creative writing at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, PA, and at Grub Street. Visit her online at www.alexandria-marzano-lesnevich.com.

7E: Making the Past Present

Tara L. Masih (Panelist)

Tara L. Masih is editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (a ForeWord Book of the Year), The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays (a Skipping Stones Honor Book), and author of Where the Dog Star Never Glows (a National Best Books Award finalist). Her flash has been anthologized in Word of Mouth, Brevity & Echo, and Stripped, and was featured in Fiction Writer’s Review for National Short Story Month 2011. Awards for her work include first place in The Ledge Magazine’s fiction contest and Pushcart Prize, Best New American Voices, and Best of the Web nominations. For more information, please visit www.taramasih.com.

8J: Flash/Film: Storytelling in the DIY Age

Stephen McCauley (Author)

Stephen McCauley is the author of six novels. He has also published two novels under a pseudonym. His stories, reviews, and columns have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, The Boston Globe, and many other publications. He is currently Associate Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University.

2F: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part I

Option 6: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part II

Jael McHenry (Author)

Jael McHenry is the author of The Kitchen Daughter (Simon & Schuster, 2011) and a monthly contributor to Writer Unboxed (writerunboxed.com), recognized by Writer's Digest as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers every year since 2007. Her work has appeared in publications such as the North American Review, Indiana Review, and the Graduate Review at American University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. Learn more about Jael's work at jaelmchenry.com or follow her on Twitter at @jaelmchenry. She lives in New York City.

Option 1: Flip The Script: Turning Chestnuts Into Gold

Kristen McLean (Special Guest)

Kristen McLean is a book futurist, a consumer zoologist, and an idea omnivore. She is also the founder & CEO of Bookigee, a Miami-based company that develops groundbreaking tools and innovative analytics that help the $28B Book Industry meet the digital future. Their first tool WriterCube--a DIY Audience Research & Marketing Support Tool for Authors--is currently in free beta. An eighteen year industry veteran, Kristen lectures around the world on the future of books, reading, and consumer behavior in the 21st Century. When she isn't building her company or on the road speaking, she's prowling the streets of Miami in search of good coffee and great conversation. Find out more at www.bookigee.com or www.kristenmclean.org.

Option 7: Beyond Facebook and Twitter: Other Digital Marketing Tools for Authors

6J: Promotion and Publicity

7H: Taming Twitter

Pablo Medina (Author)

Pablo Medina is the author of 13 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translation, among them the novel Cubop City Blues (Grove, 2012), the poetry collection The Man Who Wrote on Water (Hanging Loose, 2011), and, with Mark Statman, a translation of García Lorca’s Poet in New York (Grove, 2009). Medina’s work has appeared in several languages, among them Spanish, French, German, and Arabic, and in periodicals and magazines throughout the world. He was a member of the AWP board of directors from 2002-2007, serving as president from 2005 – 2006. Winner of numerous awards, among them grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, the Oscar B. Cintas Foundation, the state arts councils of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the NEA, the Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, and others, Medina is currently professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston.

3A: Lyric Moment and Narrative Mo(ve)ment in Fiction

Mameve Medwed (Author)

Mameve Medwed (named for two grandmothers, Mamie and Eva) is the author of the novels Mail, Host Family, The End of an Error, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life, (2007 Massachusetts Honor award for Fiction) and Of Men and Their Mothers. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the anthologies How To Spell Hanukah, My Bookstore, and What My Mother Gave Me and, among others, in the New York Times, Gourmet, Yankee, Boston Globe, Missouri Review, Newsday, and The Washington Post. Born in Bangor, Maine, she currently lives in Cambridge.

2F: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part I

Option 6: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part II

Ellen Meeropol (Author)

Ellen Meeropol’s first novel, House Arrest, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly as “thoughtful and tightly composed, unflinching in taking on challenging subjects and deliberating uneasy ethical conundrums." Ellen began writing fiction in her fifties while working as a nurse practitioner. Drawing material from her twin passions of medical ethics and social justice activism, her fiction explores characters at the intersection of political turmoil, moral dilemmas, and family loyalties. Her short stories have appeared in The Drum, Bridges, Portland Magazine, Pedestal, Patchwork Journal, and The Women’s Times.

Option 9: Women (Writers) of a Certain Age

Roland Merullo (Author)

Roland Merullo is the author of ten novels and five books of non-fiction. His best-selling novel, Breakfast with Buddha, was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Prize, and his books have won Massachusetts Book Awards in fiction and non-fiction and have been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Croatian. He has taught at Bennington and Amherst Colleges but for the past 15 years has made his living only from writing. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife, Amanda, and their two daughters.

8B: The Demons of the Blank Page

Randy Susan Meyers (Author)

Randy Susan Meyers is the author of The Comfort of Lies (February 2013). Her debut novel, The Murderer’s Daughters, was chosen as a Mass Book Awards finalist and a “Must Read Book 2011” by the Massachusetts Book Council, who wrote: “The clear and distinctive voice of Randy Susan Meyers will have you enraptured and wanting more.” Her book was chosen as a Target Book Club Choice and she is the coauthor with M.J. Rose of What To Do Before Your Book Launch. Randy Susan Meyers’ novels are informed by her years spent bartending, her work with violent offenders, and too many years being enamored by bad boys. Raised in Brooklyn New York, Randy now lives in Boston with her husband, and is the mother of two grown daughters.

Option 9: Women (Writers) of a Certain Age

6J: Promotion and Publicity

8E: Manuscript & Workshop Critique: Managing & Using Criticism & Complaints

Madeline Miller (Author)

Madeline Miller has a BA and MA from Brown University in Classics, and has been teaching Latin, Greek, Writing and Shakespeare for the last ten years. She has also studied in the Dramaturgy department at the Yale School of Drama, where she focused on the adaptation of classical texts to modern forms. The Song of Achilles, her first novel, was awarded the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction, and was a New York Times Bestseller; Miller was also shortlisted for Stonewall's Writer of the Year. She currently lives in Cambridge where she teaches and writes.

1B: Getting Unstuck

Option 2: Getting Unstuck

Ilan Mochari (Author)

Ilan Mochari's debut novel, Zinsky the Obscure (Fomite Press), will be released in April, and is now available for pre-order on Amazon. His short stories have appeared in Keyhole, Stymie, Ruthie's Club, and Oysters & Chocolate. He is Chief Writer for The Build Network and a contributor to Cognoscenti, the online magazine for Boston's NPR news station. In 2009, he received a Literature Artist Fellowship grant from the Somerville Arts Council. He has a B.A. in English from Yale University. He used it to wait tables for nine years in the Boston area.

Option 11: Successful Small Press Publishing: Author Perspective

Nina Louise Morrison (Author)

Nina Louise Morrison is a playwright, actor, director and dramaturg. Her plays include Mad Props, House Rules, The Red Plague, Constitution and Three Patriotic Acts. She is a Richard Rodgers Fellow, a Shubert Foundation grantee, and an affiliated artist with Free Hands Theatre Company, Boston Bohemia, Playwrights Commons' Freedom Art Retreat and Company One’s Playground. Before moving to Boston, Nina was the Senior Program Associate at the Philadelphia Theater Initiative. Training: MFA Columbia University, the National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, the New Actors Workshop, and Oberlin College. More info at ninalouisemorrison.wordpress.com.

2F: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part I

Option 6: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part II

4L: Literary Idol: Fiction Focus

Alessandro Nivola (Special Guest)

Alessandro Nivola’s first professional leading role earned him a Drama Desk Award Nomination for his performance opposite Helen Mirren on Broadway in Turgenev’s A Month In The Country. The following year he drew critical acclaim and a Blockbuster Award Nomination for playing Nicolas Cage’s paranoid genius younger brother in John Woo’s Face/Off. A series of roles in English movies followed, establishing him as one of the few Americans capable of playing British characters from all regions and classes. He starred as a Hastings fisherman opposite Rachel Weisz in Michael Winterbottom’s I Want You, played Henry Crawford in the Patricia Rozema adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and a singing/dancing King Ferdinand of Navarre in Kenneth Brannagh’s musical film of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.

Back in the US he starred opposite Reese Witherspoon in Best Laid Plans, and played leading roles in Jurassic Park 3, and Mike Figgis’ Time Code. He returned to the theater to play Orlando to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Rosalind in As You Like It at Williamstown, before being reunited with Helen Mirren in Peter Jan Brugge’s film The Clearing, where he played Robert Redford’s son. He earned an Independent Spirit Award Nomination for his performance as the rock singer Ian McNight in Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon. Alessandro will next star opposite Elle Fanning and Annette Bening in Bomb, the new film from Sally Potter about the relationship between a radical anarchist (Nivola) and his daughter (Fanning) in early 1960s London. Alessandro received the Achievement in Acting Award from the Provincetown International Film Festival in 2010. The award was given for his collective work. He is a graduate of Yale University with a BA in English.

Session 3K: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition

Session 4A: Would Your Book Make A Good Film? An Interview with Alessandro Nivola

Anna Stein O'Sullivan (Literary Agent)

Anna Stein O'Sullivan joined Aitken Alexander Associates in June 2009 as a senior agent heading up the New York office of this London-based agency. Previously, she was an agent and foreign rights manager at the Irene Skolnick Literary Agency. She represents literary fiction and narrative non-fiction.

Alix Ohlin (Author)

Alix Ohlin is the author of four books, most recently Signs and Wonders and Inside, which was named a top book of the year by the Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, Amazon.ca, and iTunes Canada. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best New American Voices, and on NPR's "Selected Shorts." She lives in Easton, PA and teaches at Lafayette College and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

6A: Misfits and Malfeasance: The Criminal Act in Fiction

Edward Orloff (Literary Agent)

Edward Orloff is a literary agent at McCormick & Williams. Before joining the company he worked for six years at The Wylie Agency. Prior to Wylie he worked at Artforum, Film Comment, and Partisan Review. He is interested in literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, especially cultural history, politics, biography, and the arts.

Pamela Painter (Author)

Bio coming!

8J: Flash/Film: Storytelling in the DIY Age

Amanda Palmer (Special Guest)

Coming into public consciousness in 2002 with punk-cabaret troupe The Dresden Dolls, Amanda Palmer has heaved her way to the top of the music industry. Four albums and five tours later, she and her independent attitude went solo, releasing Who Killed Amanda Palmer, produced by Ben Folds, in 2008. Two self-released EP’s followed, along with a musical theater-esque Evelyn Evelyn album and tour with Jason Webley. Palmer has made a name for herself in the last few years as the quintessential social media artist, engaging in daily interactions with her fans 365 days a year and making an art form out of Twitter. With over half a million Twitter followers and a deeply personal blog, she has one of the most responsive and supportive online fan bases on the internet. Palmer made global headlines this year with her wildly successful Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign, raising $1.2 million dollars for her new album, Theatre is Evil. Passion is what drives Amanda, and her success proves how determined she really is to make a difference not only in her own music, but in the way that music is created and consumed around the globe. Amanda Palmer has taken everything that was in her nimble-fingered grasp, from tweeted keytars to Melbourne coffees and the expansive grounds of the internet, and has woven them into a world first. This is the future of music, and Amanda Palmer is leading the way.

Marketplace Keynote Address

Bethanne Kelly Patrick (Special Guest)

Bethanne Kelly Patrick is a writer and author who tweets @TheBookMaven and who founded the popular #fridayreads hashtag on Twitter. Patrick has blogged as "The Book Maven" for AOL and Publishers Weekly, among others, and helped launch Shelf Awareness for Readers and Book Riot before "going rogue" (read: freelance) to write her first novel. Her first two books for National Geographic are An Uncommon History of Common Things (with John Thompson) and An Uncommon History of Common Courtesy; she is currently working on a new project for National Geographic. Patrick, a graduate of Smith College and The University of Virginia, lives in Arlington, VA.

Option 8: Developing a Distinctive Voice on Social Media

7J: How to Catch the Reviewer’s Eye

Mitali Perkins (Author)

Mitali Perkins was born in Kolkata, India; by the time she was 11, she’d lived in Ghana, Cameroon, London, New York, and Mexico before settling in California just in time for middle school. After studying political science at Stanford and public policy at U.C. Berkeley, she taught in middle school, high school, and at the college level. When she began to write fiction, her protagonists were often—not surprisingly—strong female characters trying to bridge different cultures. Mitali has written several acclaimed books for young readers, including Bamboo People, a Junior Library Guild selection, ALA Top Ten YA Fiction pick, and an ABA Indie's Choice Honor Book; Monsoon Summer, an ALA Quick Pick, a Bank Street Best Book, a New York Library Book for the Teen Age, and a Texas Library Association TAYSHAS Best Book for Young Adults; Rickshaw Girl, winner of a Jane Addams Honor Award, the Maine Lupine Honor Award, and the Julia Ward Howe Honor Award; Secret Keeper, an IRA Notable Book for a Global Society and on the ALA’s Amelia Bloomer list of great titles that empower girls; and the First Daughter books. She speaks frequently about the transforming power of stories as windows and mirrors, blogs about “books between cultures” (mitaliblog.com), tweets regularly (@mitaliperkins), and also connects with readers through Facebook (facebook.com/authormitaliperkins). She lives and writes in Newton, Massachusetts. Visit mitaliperkins.com.

3G: Crafting Conversation in Fiction for Young Readers

Charles P. Pierce (Author)

Charles P. Pierce is a contributing writer to both Esquire Magazine and Grantland.com. He has been a working journalist for more than 35 years, and has worked at the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Herald, The National, and GQ. His work has appeared in Sports Illustrated, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among other venues. He is the author of four books, including the national bestseller, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became A Virtue In The Land Of The Free.

8C: The New Journalism In The New Media

Henriette Lazaridis Power (Author)

Henriette Lazaridis Power's work has appeared in publications including Salamander, the New England Review, The Millions, The New York Times online, and Narrative Magazine. She is the founding editor of The Drum, an online literary magazine publishing short fiction and essays exclusively in audio form. Her first novel The Clover House will be published in April 2013 by Ballantine Books.

Option 2: The Family Plot: Drawing Fiction from Family History

Stephen Puleo (Author)

Stephen Puleo is an author, historian, university teacher, public speaker, and communications professional. His books include The Caning: The Assault That Drove America to Civil War; A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900; The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day; Due to Enemy Action: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle 56; and Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. A former award-winning newspaper reporter and contributor of feature stories and book reviews to American History magazine and the Boston Globe, Puleo holds a master’s degree in history, for which he received the Dean’s Award for Academic Achievement, and was the Graduate Convocation keynote speaker. He teaches at Suffolk University in Boston.

An experienced, dynamic, and in-demand speaker and presenter, he has made more than 350 public appearances, before thousands of readers, since the publication of his first book in 2003. Events have included bookstore signings, keynote addresses, presentations at libraries, historical societies, community events, seminars, panel discussions, book clubs (nearly 50 have chosen his books), newspaper and magazine interviews, radio and television appearances, and appearances at universities, and public and private K-12 schools. In addition to his strong journalism and historical writing background, Steve has nearly 25 years of experience in public relations, communications, speech-writing, speech coaching, and marketing. Steve’s books have been reviewed favorably by the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, the Portland Press Herald, the Providence Journal, the Associated Press, the Denver Post, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Hartford Courant, Kirkus Reviews, Barnes and Noble Review.com, the Fredericksburg Star, ForeWord magazine, Forbes.com, and Publishers Weekly. Steve resides with his wife, Kate, south of Boston. He donates a portion of his book proceeds to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).

7C: The Art and Science of Writing Narrative Non-Fiction

Ladette Randolph (Magazine Editor)

Ladette Randolph is the author of three books, most recently the novel Haven’s Wake, and the editor-in-chief of Ploughshares magazine. In addition, she teaches in the MFA program at Emerson College and is co-owner of the manuscript consulting firm Randolph Lundine. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Rona Jaffe grant, a Virginia Faulkner award, a New York Times Editor's Choice citation, and a Nebraska Book Award.

Diana Renn (Author)

Diana Renn writes contemporary mysteries for young adults. Tokyo Heist (Viking/Penguin), an Indie Next pick, was published in 2012. Her next two novels from Viking, Latitude Zero and Blue Voyage, will be published in 2014 and 2015. She is the Fiction Editor at YARN (Young Adult Review Network), an award-winning online magazine featuring writing for and by teens. Diana also writes essays and short stories which have been published in a variety of magazines, including The Writer, Writer's Digest, YARN, Brain Child, Literary Mama, Lit 103.3: Fiction for the Ears, The Indiana Review, The Santa Barbara Review, and Cricket Magazine for Children. She runs a multi-author blog, Sleuths Spies & Alibis, about mysteries and thrillers for young readers. A Seattle native, Diana now lives outside of Boston with her husband and young son.

5G: Action Heroes and Propulsive Plots: How Not to Bore Teen Readers

Hillary Rettig (Author)

Hillary Rettig is an author, workshop leader, and coach who specializes in helping people overcome procrastination and use their time better. Her latest book is The Seven Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism and Writer's Block (Infinite Art, 2011). Of her prior book, The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way (Lantern Books, 2006), the leading liberal blog, DailyKos.com, said, "If I had but one book to spend hard-earned cash on this year, The Lifelong Activist would be it, hands down." Hillary is a Bronx native who currently enjoys living in East Boston. She has published numerous nonfiction articles, and also short fiction. Some of the acclaimed science fiction writers she has studied with are Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel R. Delaney and the late Octavia Butler. Hillary is also a kidney donor, foster parent, lover of dogs and other animals, and vegan. Download free ebooks and other information on productivity and related fields at www.hillaryrettig.com, and Hillary welcomes your emails at hillaryrettig@yahoo.com.

Option 6: Writer Retribution Bingo

Margaret Riley (Literary Agent)

Margaret Riley is an agent in the Literary Department at William Morris Endeavor, where she began her career after graduating from Princeton University with a BA in History and a Certificate in Theater and Dance. She represents both literary and commercial fiction, some narrative nonfiction and memoir, with a focus on a voice driven material and lifestyle titles in the areas of food, psychology, health, relationships and well-being. Her recent and upcoming projects include: University of Kansas MFA recipient Katie Savage’s Whirlybirds and Ordinary Times (Howard Books), David Bertsch's Death Canyon series (Scribner), Cammie McGovern’s first young adult novel, Amy and Matthew (HarperCollins Children’s), Mark Kruger’s upcoming YA novel, Overpowered (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) and The Real Girl's Kitchen (Razorbill), a debut cookbook by actress turned foodie Haylie Duff. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Margaret currently resides in New York City.

Denise Roy (Editor)

Denise Roy joined Dutton as Senior Editor in 2009. Her list focuses on fiction—contemporary and historical. Forthcoming in 2013 is New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Chiaverini's historical novel Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker, which chronicles the extraordinary friendship between Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave who won her freedom by the skill of her needle. Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, set in 1850s Ohio along the Underground Railroad, marks the first time the internationally bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring has written about America. Lori Roy, author of Bent Road, winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, will follow her debut, named "Favorite Suspense Novel of 2011" by the New York Times, with Until She Comes Home. In Bee Ridgway's debut, The River of No Return, acquired in a dual pre-empt with Michael Joseph, a man and a woman reside in different centuries and unknowingly share a powerful gift that at once divides and unites them. Additionally, Denise acquires trade-paperback original fiction for Plume.

5L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein (Author)

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein is a pediatrician as well as a published and prize-winning author. She writes frequently about the intersection of life as a doctor, mother and writer. Her essays have appeared in literary and medical journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, The Writer, BrainChild, Literary Mama and several Chicken Soup for the Soul anthologies. Her medically themed fiction has appeared in The Examined Life, Hospital Drive, the Charles River Review and won third place in the Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Competition. Her memoir Crash: A Mother, a Son and the Journey from Grief to Gratitude (Globe Pequot Press) is due out this fall. She speaks frequently to civic groups, schools, and professional organizations raising awareness about traumatic brain injury and underage drunk-driving. She writes all of her own speeches.

Option 2: Building a Better Platform with Better Speech-Writing

Vaughn Roycroft (Panelist)

In the sixth grade, Vaughn’s teacher gave him a copy of The Hobbit, sparking a lifelong passion for reading and storytelling. After college, life intervened, and rather than writing fantasy fiction, Vaughn spent twenty years building a successful business. After many milestone achievements, and with the mantra ‘life’s too short,’ he and his wife left their hectic lives in the business world, moved to their getaway cottage near their favorite shore, and Vaughn finally returned to writing. In addition to polishing his epic fantasy trilogy, Vaughn is a moderator for the Writer Unboxed Facebook Community as well as a regular contributor to the WU newsletter, Writer Inboxed.

Get a glimpse into Vaughn’s writerly world at vaughnroycroftblog.com.

Option 4: Strength in Numbers: Leveraging the Power of Online Communities

Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein (Literary Agent)

Elizabeth Winick Rubinstein is President and Managing Agent at McIntosh & Otis, Inc. Literary Agency where she represents the estates of many prominent American authors including John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Walker Percy, Upton Sinclair, Erskine Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe. In addition to overseeing the management of McIntosh and Otis Inc.’s extensive and distinguished back list, Elizabeth manages an active front list which includes numerous New York Times bestsellers, USA Today bestsellers and both Agatha and Edgar Award winners and nominees. Elizabeth holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University and a degree from Manhattan School of Music. She began her book publishing career in subsidiary rights and then took on the responsibilities of acquisitions editor at a major audio publishing imprint before moving to McIntosh and Otis, Inc. where she entered as Subsidiary Rights Manager. Elizabeth is an AAR member, is on the advisory board for the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and The National Steinbeck Center.

Matthew Salesses (Author)

Matthew Salesses is the author of I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying (coming Feb 2013 from Civil Coping Mechanisms). He also wrote The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and two chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). He was born in Korea and adopted at age two, and currently lives in Boston with his wife, baby, and cats. His stories have been published in Glimmer Train, Witness, Pleiades, American Short Fiction, The Literary Review, and over fifty others, and have received awards from Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, PANK, HTMLGIANT, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The University of New Orleans, and IMPAC. His nonfiction appears in the Good Men Project, The Rumpus, Koream, and others. He received his MFA from Emerson College, where he was the Presidential Fellow and edited Redivider, and now serves as Fiction Editor and a columnist for the Good Men Project.

6F: Essentials of Style

Benjamin Samuel (Magazine Editor)

Benjamin Samuel is the co-editor of Electric Literature, an independent publishing company the Washington Post called a "refreshingly bold act of optimism." Founded in 2009, Electric Literature uses new technologies to ensure literature maintains a place of prominence in popular culture. Their magazine, Recommended Reading—a weekly digital-only publication curated by literary tastemakers—was the first major literary magazine to publish directly to Tumblr, and picked up over 35,000 subscribers in its first six months. Benjamin has an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, and his thoughts on literature and publishing have been appeared in the Huffington Post, the LA Times, GalleyCat, Poets & Writers, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

4J: The Web Wants You: Online Opportunities for Writers

6K: Editors Tell All: Southern Review & Electric Literature & Slice

Katharine Sands (Literary Agent)

A literary agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency, Katharine Sands has worked with a varied list of fiction and non-fiction authors who publish a diverse array of books. Highlights include Dating the Devil (producer: Vast Entertainment) by Lia Romeo; XTC: SongStories; Chasing Zebras: The Unofficial Guide to House, MD; Make Up, Don't Break Up with Oprah guest Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil; Playwright Robert Patrick's novel, Temple Slave; The Complete Book on International Adoption: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Your Child; Hands Off My Belly: The Pregnant Woman's Survival Guide to Myths, Mothers, and Moods; Under the Hula Moon; Whipped: A Professional Dominatrix's Secrets for Wrapping Men Around Your Little Finger; The Gay Vacation Guide; CityTripping: a Guide for Foodies, Fashionistas and the Generally Syle-Obsessed; Writers on Directors; How to Create an Identity for a Brilliant Career, Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Annulled, Beheaded, Survived: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Ford model Helen Lee's The Tao of Beauty; Elvis and You: Your Guide to the Pleasures of Being an Elvis Fan; New York: Songs of the City; Taxpertise: Dirty Little Secrets the IRS Doesn't Want You to Know; The SAT Word Slam; Divorce After 50; The Complete Book of Bone Health; and The Safe and Sane Guide to Teenage Plastic Surgery, to name a few. She is the agent provocateur of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent's Eye, a collection of pitching wisdom from leading literary agents. Actively building her client list, she likes books that have a clear benefit for readers' lives in categories of food, travel, lifestyle, home arts, beauty, wisdom, relationships, parenting, and fresh looks, which might be at issues, life challenges or popular culture. When reading fiction she wants to be compelled and propelled by urgent storytelling, and hooked by characters. For memoir and femoir, she likes to be transported to a world rarely or newly observed.

1G: How To Talk to Agents: Part I

2G: How To Talk to Agents: Part 2

Rebecca Joines Schinsky (Special Guest)

Rebecca writes about books, the reading life, and the publishing industry at her popular literary site The Book Lady's Blog. She is a freelance writer, critic, and social media strategist and works as an editor at Book Riot. When not reading books and writing about them, she can be found on the Bookrageous podcast and the board of James River Writers in her adopted hometown Richmond, VA.

4H: One Fan At A Time: Building a Community of Readers the Old-Fashioned Way

6J: Promotion and Publicity

7J: How to Catch the Reviewer’s Eye

Katrin Schumann (Author)

Katrin Schumann is the co-author of The Secret Power of Middle Children and Mothers Need Time-Outs, Too. She has been featured on the TODAY show, Talk of the Nation and in The Times, as well as other newspapers, magazines and radio, nationally and internationally. Schumann’s latest projects include a historical novel set in the Baltic, various non-fiction books in development, and on-going editorial work for editors, agents and writers. For the past ten years she has been teaching fiction and non-fiction, most recently at a local women’s prison, and running parenting focus groups and surveys. Before going freelance, she helped produce talk shows at NPR, where she won the Kogan Media Award. Schumann has been granted writing residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Norman Mailer Writer's Colony. Awarded scholarships to Oxford and Stanford Universities, she studied literature, language and journalism. Schumann was born in Freiburg, Germany, grew up in New York City and London, and now lives in Massachusetts.

7K: A Logical Approach To a Successful Book Launch

James Scott (Author)

James Scott's debut novel, The Kept, will be published by Harper in early 2014. His short fiction has been featured in various anthologies and magazines such as Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, and Post Road. James has received awards and residencies from Yaddo, Emerson College, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the New York State Summer Writers' Institute, VCCA, the Millay Colony, and St. Botolph's Club.

5F: The Essentials of Structure

B.A. Shapiro (Author)

B.A. Shapiro is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels (The Art Forger, The Safe Room, Blind Spot, See No Evil, Blameless and Shattered Echoes), four screenplays (Blind Spot, The Lost Coven, Borderline, and Shattered Echoes) and the non-fiction book, The Big Squeeze. In her previous career incarnations, she directed research projects for a residential substance abuse facility, worked as a systems analyst/statistician, headed the Boston office of a software development firm, and served as an adjunct professor teaching sociology at Tufts University and creative writing at Northeastern University. She likes being a novelist the best. She began her writing career when she quit her high-pressure job after the birth of her second child. Nervous about what to do next, she confessed to her mother, “If I’m not playing at being superwoman anymore, I don’t know who I am.” Her mother asked, “If you had one year to live, how would you want to spend it?” The answer: write a novel and spend more time with her children. And that’s exactly what she did. Smart mother. After writing ten novels and raising her children, she now lives in Boston with her husband Dan and her dog Sagan. She’s working on yet another novel but has no plans to raise any more children.

5D: Plot Is the Verb That Moves Your Novel Forward

8H: Plot Is the Verb That Moves Your Novel Forward

Jessica Shattuck (Author)

Jessica Shattuck is the author of Perfect Life (WW Norton 2009) and The Hazards of Good Breeding (WW Norton 2003). Her short fiction has appeared in Glamour, Open City, The Tampa Review and The New Yorker. She has taught creative writing at Grub Street and at the Emerson College MFA program.

7E: Making the Past Present

Jacqueline Sheehan (Author)

Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a New York Times Bestselling author of fiction. She is also a psychologist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, photography, freelance journalism, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers. Her novels include The Comet’s Tale, a novel about Sojourner Truth, Lost & Found, Now & Then, and Picture This. She has published travel articles, short stories, and numerous essays and radio pieces. In 2005, she edited the anthology Women Writing in Prison. Jacqueline has been awarded residencies at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland and Jentel Arts Colony in Wyoming. She teaches workshops at Grub Street in Boston and Writers in Progress in Florence, Massachusetts. She has attended international writing retreats in Jamaica, Guatemala, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.

3E: The Psychology of Strong Characters

Option 11: How to Form a Peer-Led Writing and Manuscript Group

Anita Shreve (Author)

Anita Shreve is the author of sixteen novels. Her newest book will be out from Little Brown in the fall. She lives in both Maine and Boston.

2F: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part I

Option 6: Literary Idol: Star Author Edition: Part II

Susan Richards Shreve (Author)

Susan Richards Shreve is the author of fourteen novels, most recently of You Are The Love Of My Life from WWNorton published in August, 2012, Plum And Jaggers, a novel published by FSG in 2000 and out of print, will be reissued in hard/soft in 2013 as one of ten books which are part of the Book Lusts project founded by Nancy Pearl in partnership with Amazon, A Student Of Living Things, and a memoir, Warm Springs: Traces Of A Childhood which were published in 2006 and 2007. A Country Of Strangers has long been under option for film and Daughters Of The New World was an NBC mini-series under the title A Will Of Their Own. She has written twenty-nine books for children, most recently The Lovely Shoes and has been the editor or co-editor of five anthologies, three with her son Porter Shreve, who is also a novelist. She is the founder of the Master of Fine Arts Degree at George Mason University where she is a Professor of English and has been a Visiting Writer at Princeton, Columbia, the Jenny Moore Chair in Creative Writing at GWU, and Goucher College. She has received a Guggenheim and a National Endowment award for Fiction, and the Service award from Poets and Writers. She is the CO-Chairman with Robert Stone of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation located in Washington, D.C.

5B: The Scene

Todd Shuster (Panelist)

Todd Shuster is a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency. Following college at Yale and law school at Northeastern University (where he subsequently taught on the adjunct faculty), Shuster practiced publishing and entertainment law at the Boston law firms of Palmer & Dodge and Ropes & Gray. A literary agent for nearly two decades, Shuster co-heads the New York office of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, where he represents national newspaper, magazine, and on-air reporters and correspondents developing works of narrative and expository non-fiction; experts writing on current affairs, politics, business, psychology, science, and technology; prominent memoirists and biographers; authors of literary and commercial fiction; and prominent institutions creating books, including major national newspapers, consulting firms and not-for-profit organizations. In addition to working with authors to edit, revise, and sell their own manuscripts, Shuster represents numerous collaborative editors and writers helping celebrities and others write books, articles, website content, and other materials. Shuster also has extensive contacts among producers, networks and studios and has helped originate numerous film and television deals based on articles and books represented by Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.

4K: Industry Guide to Publishing: Non-Fiction

5K: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Priscille Sibley (Panelist)

Priscille Sibley is the author of the debut novel The Promise of Stardust (William Morrow, 2013.) The book is about a woman who suffers a devastating brain injury and just as her husband agrees to take her off life support, he learns she is pregnant. The novel is an IndieNext pick and Target Book Club pick for February. She's active in the Facebook Group Book Pregnant and the online writer's forum Backspace.

Priscille grew up loving the rocky coast of Maine, her family and babies. Now a neonatal intensive care nurse, she has the privilege of caring for infants so small they fit in her hand. She lives with her husband, three tall teenage sons, and their Wheaten terrier.

Option 4: Strength in Numbers: Leveraging the Power of Online Communities

Clara Silverstein (Author)

Clara Silverstein is the author of the memoir White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation (University of Georgia Press), and three cookbooks, most recently A White House Garden Cookbook, a chronicle with recipes of the first year of Michelle Obama's vegetable garden. A former food writer and editor at the Boston Herald, Silverstein's articles have also been published in Health magazine, Prevention, Runner's World, the Boston Globe, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She directs the summer Chautauqua Writers' Center, and has led writing workshops at Grub Street, Boston University, and Emerson College. She recently completed an M.A. in History.

Option 5: Say It Again: The Essentials of Revision

Kevin Smokler (Author)

Kevin Smokler is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books you Haven't Touched Since High School (Prometheus Books, Feb. 2013) and the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, A San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2005. His work has appeared in the LA Times, Fast Company, Paid Content, The San Francisco Chronicle, Publishers Weekly and on National Public Radio. Kevin Smokler sits on the advisory boards of SXSW Interactive, Salon97 and Symbolia Magazine and speaks on the future of publishing and literary culture at companies (AOL), conferences (SXSW, The Idea Festival) and universities (M.I.T, Stanford, University of Michigan) throughout North America.

4H: One Fan At A Time: Building a Community of Readers the Old-Fashioned Way

6J: Promotion and Publicity

Anna Solomon (Author)

Anna Solomon is the author of the novel, The Little Bride. Her short stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in One Story, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The Georgia Review, The New York Times Magazine, MORE, and elsewhere, and her story, "The Lobster Mafia Story," was Boston's 2012 One City One Story read. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Bread Loaf, Anna holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught writing at Grub Street, Manhattanville College, Lighthouse Writers Workshop,and Sackett Street Writers Workshop and lives in Providence with her husband and two kids.

8F: Essentials of Character

Suzette Martinez Standring (Author)

Suzette Martinez Standring is a nationally syndicated columnist and blogger (Suzette’s Spiritual Café) with GateHouse Media. She is the award-winning author of The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry, Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists, which is used in university journalism courses. She hosts It’s All Write With Suzette, a local TV show about writing, and produced Suzette Standring: A Writer’s Meditation CD, which uses guided imagery exercises to enhance writing creativity. Suzette is a past president of The National Society of Newspaper Columnists. She presents writing workshops nationally. Email her: suzmar@comcast.net or visit www.readsuzette.com.

Option 1: The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Award-Winning Columnists

Emma Straub (Author)

Emma Straub is the author of the novel Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Vogue, Tin House, the Paris Review Daily, the New York Times, Gulf Coast, and many other places. She lives in New York City.

7B: Finding Stories Wherever You Go

Emma Sweeney (Literary Agent)

Emma Sweeney is a member of the Association of Authors' Representatives and the Women's Media Group, where she served as president in 2003. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a BA in English Literature. Emma is also a writer whose own books include Tulipa (Artisan, 2000) and As Always, Jack (Little, Brown, 2002; Back Bay Books, 2003; Axios Press 2012).

3K: What Agents Want

TBA (To Be Announced)

We'll announce this person's name soon!

Alice Tasman (Literary Agent)

Alice Tasman has been a literary agent at JVNLA since 1995. Her writers have earned numerous awards and honors, including the Calvino Prize, C. Hugh Holman Award, the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, the O. Henry Prize, and the Willie Morris Award. Her authors' writing has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, McSweeney's, One Story, Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, The Normal School, and A Public Space. Awards and honors for her middle grade writers include: Texas Bluebonnet Award, Newbery Award nominee, Cybil Award nominee. She is committed to working with authors over the long term and is very hands-on in every stage of the publishing process—from editing manuscripts and refining proposals, to amassing the perfect list of editors for the project and negotiating contracts, to actively working with publishers on the publicity and marketing of the books. She earned her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

3K: What Agents Want

John Tayman (Author)

Bio coming!

4J: The Web Wants You: Online Opportunities for Writers

6D: Would Your Book Make a Good Film?

Cam Terwilliger (Author)

Cam Terwilliger's stories have appeared in many magazines, including The Mid-American Review, Post Road, West Branch, and Narrative, where he was selected as one of the magazine's "15 Under 30." His fiction has also been supported by a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, as well as fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society. A graduate of Emerson College's MFA, he now teaches at Louisiana State University.

3F: The Essentials of Point of View

Christina Thompson (Magazine Editor)

Christina Thompson is the editor of Harvard Review and the author of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Douglas Stewart Prize and the 2010 William Saroyan International Prize. A recipient of grants from the NEA and Australia Council, her work has appeared in Vogue, the American Scholar, and the Journal of Pacific History. She holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, teaches in the Writing Program at Harvard University Extension, and writes regularly for the Boston Globe.

Susan Tiberghien (Author)

Susan Tiberghien is an American-born writer living in Geneva, Switzerland. She holds a degree in Literature and Philosophy and did graduate work at the Université de Grenoble and the C.G. Jung Institute of Zurich. She is the author of three memoirs: Looking for Gold: A Year in Jungian Analysis; Circling to the Center: An Invitation to Silent Prayer; Footsteps: A European Album; and most recently, the best-selling writing book One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft. And she has published extensively short stories and essays in literary reviews and anthologies in the United States and in Europe. Tiberghien teaches and lectures at graduate programs, at C.G. Jung Centers, for the International Women’s Writing Guild, at writers’ centers in the States, and in Paris and Geneva. She is a founding member of the International Writers’ Residence at the Château de Lavigny, an active member of International PEN, and she directs the Geneva Writers’ Group and Conferences. She is married and has six grown children, and many grandchildren.

3C: From Journal to Successful Memoir

Justin Torres (Author)

Justin Torres was raised in upstate New York. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. His bestselling debut novel, We The Animals, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in September 2011, and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Justin recently received a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award, and is currently a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

1A: Close to the Bone: Creating Fiction From Personal Experience

Michelle Toth (Author)

Michelle Toth is the author of Annie Begins, an Amazon.com bestselling novel, and founder of SixOneSeven Books, a small press based in Boston which she runs together with Andrew Goldstein, author of The Bookie’s Son. Established with the idea of “writers publishing writers,” SixOneSeven Books’ additional titles include Girls I Know by Douglas Trevor (forthcoming May 2013), Veronica’s Nap by Sharon Bially, and Twelve Weeks by Karen Lee Sobol. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Michelle is currently the head of human capital for a leading investment management and technology development firm in New York City. Michelle is a long-time member of the board of directors of Grub Street, and divides her time between NYC and Boston.

3H: The Strategic Writer: You’re Bigger Than Your Book

Douglas Trevor (Author)

Douglas Trevor is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the academic monograph "The Poetics of Melancholy in Early Modern England" (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press, 2005), which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award for First Fiction. His first novel, Girls I Know, is being published this spring by SixOneSeven Books. Doug's short fiction has appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, Ontario Review, The New England Review, and about a dozen other publications. His stories have also been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Prior to joining the faculty at Michigan, Doug taught at the University of Iowa, where he served for four years as fiction editor of The Iowa Review. He is currently working on a novel set in Denver, and a collection of short stories tentatively entitled The Causes of Wonderful Things.

6B: The Richness of Place: Setting in Fiction

Dawn Tripp (Author)

Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, Dawn Tripp's fiction has earned praise from critics for her "thrilling" storytelling (People Magazine), her "haunting, ethereal" prose (Booklist), and her "marvelous characters" (Orlando Sentinel). She is the author of the novels, Moon Tide, The Season of Open Water, and, most recently, Game of Secrets, a Boston Globe bestseller. Her essays on writing have appeared in Psychology Today, The Rumpus, and on NPR. For more information, please visit her website dawntripp.com.

2A: Fragments: The Early Stages of Structuring a Novel

4D: Writing for Full-Blown Character

Becky Tuch (Author)

Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, Folio, HTMLGiant, and elsewhere. In 2011 and 2012 her work was included in The Drum's audio series at The Boston Book Festival. Additionally, she is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which reviews literary magazines and interviews journal editors. The Review Review has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins.

Option 3: The Essentials of Submitting to Literary Magazines

Helena María Viramontes (Author)

Helena María Viramontes is the author of Their Dogs Came with Them, a novel, and two previous works of fiction, The Moths and Other Stories and Under the Feet of Jesus, a novel. Named a USA Ford Fellow in Literature for 2007 by United States Artists, she has also received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Luis Leal Award and a Spirit Award from the California Latino Legislative Caucus. Viramontes is currently Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where she is at work on a new novel.

4A: Memory and Senses: Eye Witness Fiction

Therese Walsh (Special Guest)

Therese Walsh is the co-founder and director of Writer Unboxed, an award-winning website and online writing community. Writer Unboxed has been listed by Writer's Digest as one of the Top 101 Sites for Writers every year since 2007.

Therese's debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy (Random House), was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, was nominated for a RITA award for Best First Book in 2010, and was a TARGET Breakout Book. Her second novel will be published by Crown in 2014.

A researcher and writer for Prevention magazine before becoming a freelance writer and eventually turning to fiction, Therese has a master’s degree in psychology.

Option 4: Strength in Numbers: Leveraging the Power of Online Communities

Mitchell Waters (Literary Agent)

Mitchell Waters has been an agent with Curtis Brown, Ltd. for over eighteen years. He represents an eclectic array of fiction and non-fiction. Some recent, forthcoming, and representative titles include: Where You Can Find Me by Sheri Joseph, Cloudland by Joseph Olshan, The Paternity Test by Michael Lowenthal, Jane Vows Vengeance by Michael Thomas Ford, The Great American Railroad War by Dennis Drabelle, Hell Or High Water and Island Of Bones by Joy Castro, The Man Who Couldn't Eat by Jon Reiner, and The Unseen World of Poppy Malone by Suzanne Harper.

3K: What Agents Want

Paul Whitlatch (Editor)

Paul Whitlatch, editor at the Scribner imprint of Simon & Schuster, has published books by David Goodwillie (American Subversive, a New York Times Notable Book), Tony Wagner (Creating Innovators, a Washington Post Bestseller), and David Whitehouse (Bed, nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). His recent and forthcoming titles include J. M. Sidorova’s debut novel The Age of Ice; Tim Crothers' The Queen of Katwe; and To Be a Friend Is Fatal, a memoir by Kirk W. Johnson. At W.W. Norton and Scribner, he has worked on the publication of books by a range of high-profile and bestselling authors, including Stephen King, Don DeLillo, Kathy Reichs, Colm Toibin, former First Lady Laura Bush, and Pulitzer Prize-winning oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee. An adjunct instructor in the Center for Publishing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, Whitlatch was named a Frankfurt Fellow at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair and will be a Visiting International Publisher at the 2013 Sydney Writers Festival. He is acquiring books in these categories: literary fiction, thrillers, politics, technology, popular science, sports, and narrative non-fiction.

5L: Industry Guide to Publishing: Fiction

Joan Wickersham (Author)

Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story (Knopf 2012). Her memoir The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order was a 2008 National Book Award Finalist. She is also the author of a novel, The Paper Anniversary, and her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and many other publications. Joan writes a regular op-ed column for the The Boston Globe and her pieces often appear in The International Herald Tribune. Her work has also appeared in The Los Angeles Times and on National Public Radio. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the corporation of Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. Her website is www.joanwickersham.com.

7A: What’s at Stake?

James Wood (Author)

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. He was the chief literary critic at the Guardian in London, from 1992 to 1995, and a senior editor at The New Republic from 1995 to 2007. His critical essays have been collected in two volumes, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999) and The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a novel, The Book Against God (2003), and a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works (2008). He lives in Boston, and teaches half time at Harvard University, where he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism.

Julie Wu (Author)

After graduating from Harvard with a BA in literature, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Julie Wu received an MD at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. She has received a writing grant from the Vermont Studio Center and is the recipient of a 2012 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship. Her first novel, The Third Son, launches April 30, 2013 with Algonquin Books. Julie is a contributor to the blog and community Beyond the Margins, and participates actively in the Facebook group Book Pregnant.

7D: From Forest to Trees: Revision

Option 4: Strength in Numbers: The Power of Online Communities

Joanne Wyckoff (Literary Agent)

Joanne Wyckoff is an agent with the Carol Mann Agency. Prior to joining CMA, she was an agent with Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. Before becoming an agent, Joanne worked as Senior Editor at Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, and as Executive Editor at Beacon Press. As an agent, Joanne represents nonfiction and selected fiction. She has a particular love of the memoir and is always looking for exciting new voices in this genre. She also has a lot of experience working with academics and experts in diverse fields, helping them develop and write books for a broad market. Her nonfiction list includes books in psychology, women’s issues, education, health and wellness, self-help, parenting, natural history and anything about animals, religion and spirituality, and African-American issues. In fiction, her interests run to literary women’s fiction and novels that evoke a strong sense of place.

6L: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic

Steve Yarbrough (Author)

Steve Yarbrough is the author of nine books. His most recent novel, The Realm of Last Chances, is forthcoming from Knopf. He has won the California Book Award and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award and has also been a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN/Falkner Award. In 2010, he won the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence. A native of Mississippi, he now lives in Stoneham, Massachusetts, and directs the MFA Program at Emerson College.

3B: Bringing Place Alive on the Page

Laura Zigman (Panelist)

Laura Zigman is the author of four novels, including Animal Husbandry (made into the always-on-cable movie, Someone Like You [Hugh Jackman/Ashley Judd]); Dating Big Bird, Her, and Piece of Work, and two works of collaborative (ghostwritten) non-fiction. She's contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, and other publications, and is a frequent blogger for the The Huffington Post. She's the co-host, with authors Ann Leary and Julie Klam, of the NPR show, "Hash Hags," and the creator of the "Annoying Conversations" Xtranormal Video Series, which has over 70 videos and 240,000 views to date. She lives outside Boston with her husband and son.

Option 8: Developing a Distinctive Voice on Social Media

Mitchell Zuckoff (Author)

Mitchell Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University. He is the author of the newly published Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II. His previous book is Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II. Published in April 2011, the book spent more than two months on The New York Times’ bestseller list and won the 2012 Winship/PEN New England Award. Lost in Shangri-La was named one of the Best Books of 2011 by Amazon.com, Salon.com, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Entertainment Weekly, Apple’s iBookstore, Kirkus Reviews, and others. His previous books are Robert Altman: The Oral Biography; Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend, and Choosing Naia: A Family's Journey. He is co-author of Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders. His magazine work has appeared in The New Yorker, Fortune, and other national and regional publications. Zuckoff is a former special projects reporter for The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for investigative reporting. He received the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Livingston Award for International Reporting, the Heywood Broun Award, and the Associated Press Managing Editors' Public Service Award, among other national honors.

5C: Hiding in Plain Sight: Finding Story and Book Ideas Other Writers Miss