Authors

Junot Díaz & Jacqueline Woodson in Conversation

Authors Junot Díaz and Jacqueline Woodson join us for a conversation in the Barn that delves into the divisive politics of our age and what it means to be an American fiction writer of color today. Junot Díaz, whose work has been honored with a Pulitzer and a MacArthur, joins Jacqueline Woodson, whose books for readers of all ages have won prizes including a National Book Award and a Coretta Scott King Award. From his Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to her Brown Girl Dreaming, from his activist work in the Dominican-American community to her stories for teenage readers about what it means to grow up black and gay, Diaz and Woodson are writers who know how to raise their voices when it counts.

WCAI was a media sponsor for this event.

Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy

Richard Russo & Hannah Tinti in Conversation

On May 20, 2017, Twenty Summers was proud to bring together the accomplished and widely admired Richard Russo and Hannah Tinti, each on tour for a new book: Russo for Trajectory, a quartet of novellas; Tinti for her second novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, praised in the Washington Post as “a master class in literary suspense.” In addition to writing ten other books, including the Pulitzer prize–winning novel Empire Falls and the best-selling memoir Elsewhere, Russo is a veteran screenwriter. His novel Nobody’s Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy. Tinti is also the author of an internationally acclaimed story collection, Animal Crackers, and The Good Thief, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. She is a cofounder and executive editor of the journal One Story and of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Italy. She was recently named one of the 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture. Russo and Tinti, friends as well as kindred authors, discuss life, literature, and anything else they please.

Twenty Summers cofounder Julia Glass moderated.

Media sponsorship by WCAI.

Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy

Alysia Abbott and Joan Wickersham in Conversation

Twenty Summers welcomed authors Alysia Abbott (Fairyland) and Joan Wickersham (The Suicide Index) to the Barn, who have both written critically acclaimed memoirs about the fathers they loved and lost too soon. The two authors discussed their memoirs, their writing lives, and their other work in this deeply personal and fascinating conversation. WCAI was a media sponsor for this event.

Production Credits: Filming by Stone Dow and Lise King, Sean Gannett Productions Audio by Chris Blood Edited by Filipp Kotsishevskiy

Geraldine Brooks and Amy Bloom in Conversation

Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks will share the Barn’s stage with fellow New York Times bestseller Amy Bloom, in a conversation moderated by poet Gail Mazur. Geraldine Brooks is the author of five historical novels (including March and People of the Book), a memoir, and Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. Last year, Booklist praised The Secret Chord, Brooks’s fictional portrait of King David, as “a gorgeously written novel of ambition, courage, retribution, and triumph.” Amy Bloom’s catalogue of fiction and nonfiction ranges from Away and Where the God of Love Hangs Out to Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude. According to the Washington Post, her latest, Lucky Us, is proof that “if America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity.” Both women have lived rich and variegated lives beyond the page: Brooks as an environmentalist and foreign correspondent, Bloom as a psychotherapist and teacher. Gail Mazur, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College and author of seven poetry collections, serves on the Writing Committee at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center.

A Century Onstage Performed by James True-Frost

On May 28, 2016, Twenty Summers hosted a theatrical reading of 100 YEARS, a new book of sage literary quotations on every age from birth to one hundred. Compiled by Twenty Summers cofounder Joshua Prager and visualized by Milton Glaser, the legendary graphic designer who created the I ♥ NY logo, the book moves year by year through the words of our most beloved authors. A Century Onstage is performed by the actor Jim True-Frost, best known for his work on the HBO series “The Wire.”

Michael Cunningham and Adam Gopnik in Conversation

Pulitzer prize–winning novelist Michael Cunningham (a Ptown regular) and the Canadian-American New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik (who’s partial to Wellfleet) united onstage for the first time ever, to talk of matters newsworthy and intimate, factual and imaginary, lofty and lowbrow. Learning to drive, channeling Virginia Woolf, parenting in a foreign country, trespassing in the forbidden forest of the fairy tale.

Storytellers: Christine Horovitz

Christine Horovitz is the owner of Kiss and Makeup, a skin care, hair care, and cosmetics store and spa for men and women in Provincetown. She is is writing her first book about her journey to becoming transgender. In the early 1990s, she moved to Provincetown, where she met her husband. Together for fourteen years, they built a life in Rhode Island until Horovitz was widowed by his accidental death. She relocated to Provincetown five years ago.

Storytellers: Jane Isay

Jane Isay is the author of Walking on Eggshells: Navigating the Delicate Relationship Between Grown Children and Parents, Mom Still Likes You Best: The Unfinished Business Between Siblings, and Secrets and Lies: Surviving the Truths That Change Our Lives. She has lectured on these subjects across the country and appeared on network TV and NPR. She is also the author/editor of You Are My Witness: The Living Words of Rabbi Marshall T. Meyers.Before becoming a writer, Isay was an editor for more than 40 years, publishing a broad range of nonfiction, with a special focus on psychology, at Yale University Press, Basic Books, Addison-Wesley, Grosset Books, and ultimately as editor in chief of Harcourt. Over the years, she worked on books by such esteemed authors as Robert J. Lifton, Howard Gardner, Alice Miller, and Mary Pipher. For over a decade, Isay chaired the Association of American Publishers’ Freedom to Read Committee. She has served on boards of directors of a number of nonprofit publishers and chaired the board of The New Press while sharing her expertise at publishing courses and panels in New York and around the country. She lives in Manhattan.

An Evening of Writerly Conversations

Fantasy, Reality, and Bookcraft: The Art of World Building.” Gregory Maguire, author of the Oz-inspired series The Wicked Years, and National Book Award–winning young-adult author M. T. Anderson (Feed; The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing) discuss their lives, their craft, and their upcoming books in a staged conversation moderated by Katherine Howe, New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.

Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker in Conversation

Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein joined Twenty Summers cofounder Julia Glass for a day of conversations with writers on May 24, 2014.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and a novelist and the author of ten books. Her novels include The Mind-Body Problem, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics, and 36 Arguments for The Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.  She is also the author of Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, named one of the best science books of 2005 by Discover magazine, and the award-winning Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. Her latest book is Plato at The Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away. Goldstein has been received numerous honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 1996 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “genius” prize.  She has also been named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association and Free-thought Heroine by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is visiting Professor of Philosophy at New College of the Humanities in London.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received seven honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language InstinctHow the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and often writes for the New York TimesTime, and the New Republic. He has been named Humanist of the Year and has appeared on such prominent lists as Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy‘s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time‘s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”

Take Three: A Trio of Novelists Read and Talk

Bestselling novelists Andre Dubus III, Julia Glass, and Edward Kelsey Moore read from and talk about their new novels.

Andre Dubus III is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and FogThe Garden of Last Days, and a memoir, Townie. His most recent book, Dirty Love, published in the fall of 2013, was a New York Times “Notable Book” selection, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice,” a 2013 “Notable Fiction” choice from The Washington Post, and a Kirkus Reviews “Starred Best Book of 2013.” Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children.

Julia Glass is the author of the novels And the Dark Sacred NightThe Widower’s TaleThe Whole World Over, and the National Book Award–winning Three Junes, as well as the Kindle Single “Chairs in the Rafters.” Her third book, I See You Everywhere, a collection of linked stories, won the 2009 SUNY John Gardner Fiction Award. She has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Other awards for her fiction include the Sense of Place Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, and the Pirate’s Alley Medal for Best Novella. Her essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, edited by Sean Manning, and in Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers, edited by Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon. Also a teacher of creative writing workshops at programs ranging from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown to the M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College, Julia lives with her two sons and their father on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

Edward Kelsey Moore is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, which was awarded the 2014 First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was chosen as a 2013 Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. It was also named a 2014 Illinois Reads book by the Illinois Reading Council. Moore’s essays and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times and a number of literary magazines, including Ninth LetterIndiana ReviewAfrican American Review, and Inkwell. His short fiction has been featured on Chicago Public Radio’s Stories on Stage series. In addition to his writing, Edward maintains a career as a professional cellist, performing with a number of ensembles, including the Chicago Sinfonietta and the Joffrey Ballet Orchestra. A native of Indianapolis, Indiana, Edward lives in Chicago with his partner of many years. He is currently at work on his second novel.