Authors - Brattleboro Literary Festival

Cara Blue Adams

Cara Blue Adams is the author of You Never Get It Back, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize in the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. She has published over twenty stories in leading magazines, including Granta, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Alaska Quarterly Review, Epoch, The...

Doug Anderson

Doug Anderson’s first book of poems, The Moon Reflected Fire, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his second, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police, a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His memoir, Keep Your Head Down, was published in 2009. His new book of poems is Undress,...

Andrea Barrett

Andrea Barrett is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including the National Book Award-winning Ship Fever and Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship, as well as a finalist for the Story...

Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of three collections of short stories, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and a new collection, How Strange a Season. She is currently writing a book on the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Megan is a journalist, essayist, and critic who has...

Harry Bliss

Harry Bliss is a cartoonist and cover artist for the New Yorker magazine. His syndicated single-panel comic ‘Bliss’ appears in newspapers internationally. He has written and illustrated over 25 books for children and is the founder of the Cornish CCS Fellowship for Graphic Novelists in Cornish, New Hampshire. His...

Buzz Bissinger

Buzz Bissinger is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of four books, including the New York Times bestsellers 3 Nights in August and Friday Night Lights, which has sold two million copies and inspired a film and TV franchise. He is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and...

Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, and more. A new book of poems, Everything, was published in 2021. Other collections include Nightshade, Unfathoming, Furs Not Mine, Kentucky Derby, Long Division, and The Cartographer's Vacation. Cohen’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train's...

Quintin Collins

Quintin Collins is a writer, editor, and assistant director of the Solstice Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. His work appears in many print and online publications, such as Sidereal Magazine, Superstition Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. Winner of a...

Wyn Cooper

Wyn Cooper has published five books of poems: The Country of Here Below, The Way Back, Postcards from the Interior, Chaos is the New Calm, and Mars Poetica. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Slate, Crazyhorse, AGNI, The Southern...

Steven Cramer

Steven Cramer is the author of six poetry collections, including The Eye that Desires to Look Upward; The World Book; Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand; Goodbye to the Orchard, which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club, and was named a 2005...

Alice Elliott Dark

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of the novels Fellowship Point and Think of England, and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in, among others, The New Yorker, Harper's, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Best American Short Stories,...

Kathryn Davis

Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, including The Silk Road and Duplex. Her latest book is a Aurelia, Aurelia, a memoir. She has received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Davis...

Nicholas Dawidoff

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of six books, including his new book, The Other Side of Prospect. His book, The Fly Swatter, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and another, In the Country of Country, was named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature by Condé Nast Traveller. His first book, The Catcher Was a...

Arlene Distler

Arlene Distler is co-founder of Write Action, an advocacy and networking organization for writers in the Brattleboro area. She is active in helping to organize and promote reading events and bringing about collaborations between the arts in the community. Distler is a journalist who has been writing about the...

Alison Espach

Alison Espach is the author of the novels Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, an Indie Next Pick and Amazon Editors’ Pick for 2022, and The Adults, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Barnes and Noble Discover pick. Her short story series In-Depth Market Research Interviews with Dead People...

Mason Engel

Mason Engel is a writer and a filmmaker. In 2019, Mason took a road trip around the country to 50 independent bookstores in 50 days. His goal was to promote his self-published novel, 2084, but his conversations with booksellers shifted his focus. On a second trip, he brought a...

Martín Espada

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including Vivas to Those Who Have Failed and Pulitzer finalist The Republic of Poetry. His latest book, Floaters, was the winner of the 2021 National Book Award. His other many honors include the Ruth...

Nicole Eustace

Nicole Eustace is a professor of history at New York University, where she has leadership roles in both the history of women and gender program and the Atlantic history workshop. A historian of the early modern Atlantic and the early United States, she specializes in the history of emotion....

Carolyn Ferrell

Carolyn Ferrell’s short-story collection, Don’t Erase Me, won awards from the Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, and more. Her stories have been selected for anthologies by Roxane Gay and Curtis Sittenfeld, among others. Her latest book, Dear Miss Metropolitan, was a finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and a...

Michael Fleming

Michael Fleming was born in San Francisco, raised in Wyoming, and has lived and learned and worked all around the world, from Thailand, England, and Swaziland to Berkeley, New York City, and now Brattleboro, Vermont. He’s been a teacher, a grad student, a carpenter, and always a writer; for...

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, Gathering the Tribes, and her newest collection, In the Lateness of the World. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was published by Penguin Press in 2019. In 2013,...

Tad Friend

Tad Friend is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. His memoir, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, was chosen as one of the year’s best books by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and NPR. His new memoir, In...

Ellyn Gaydos

Ellyn Gaydos received an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has received the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism, and appeared in The Texas Review, Columbia Journal, and Ninth Letter, where she received the 2017 award for creative nonfiction. She is the author of a...

Allison Gilbert

Allison Gilbert is co-author of the forthcoming book Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman, the first biography of Robinson who once the most influential newspaper columnist in the United States. She is host “Women Journalists of 9/11: Their Stories,” a 20-part documentary series produced in collaboration...

Brattleboro Literary Festival 2020 Authors