Authors - Brattleboro Literary Festival

Leslie Marie Aguilar

Leslie Marie Aguilar originally hails from the heartland of Texas. She has served as the Poetry Editor of Harbinger Journal of Literature and Art and the Poetry Editor of Indiana Review, where she previously worked as Associate Genre Editor and Web Editor. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming...

Jonathan Alter

Jonathan Alter is an award-winning historian, columnist and documentary filmmaker. An MSNBC political analyst and former senior editor at Newsweek, he is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies; The Promise: President Obama, Year One; and The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope....

Jenny Altshuler

Jenny Altshuler is a photographer and political activist and has been organizing author events since 2001. She is the coordinator for the Friends of the Belmont (MA) Public Library Author Series and a member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival author committee. Jenny holds a degree in psychology from Wesleyan University and...

Mateo Askaripour

Mateo Askaripour was a 2018 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer-in-residence. His debut novel, Black Buck, was a New York Times bestseller and a Today Show Book Club pick. His writing has appeared in Entrepreneur, Lit Hub, Catapult, The Rumpus, Medium, and elsewhere. Mateo lives in Brooklyn, and his favorite...

Russell Banks

Russell Banks, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is one of America’s most prestigious fiction writers, a past president of the International Parliament of Writers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous prizes...

Judy Batalion

Judy Batalion is the author of White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess in Between and a new book, The Light of Days,which was a New York Times bestseller. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, the Washington Post and many other publications. Prior to her writing career, she...

Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard is the author of the groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays, The Boys of My Youth, and the novel, In Zanesville. Her new, highly acclaimed essay collection, Festival Days, was published in March. Beard’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and other...

Megan Mayhew Bergman

Megan Mayhew Bergman is the author of Almost Famous Women, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, and Nightingale Lane. She is a regular columnist for The Guardian, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and Oxford American, among other publications. She...

Jason Broughton

Jason Broughton is the Director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS). Prior to joining the Library of Congress, Broughton became the first African American to serve as Vermont State Librarian, where he engaged in strategic planning for the Department of Libraries and establishing...

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore is the New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet, June, Set Me Free, and The Effects of Light. Her new novel, Fierce Little Thing, was published in late July to critical acclaim. The daughter of a writer and an anthropologist, she was born in Los Angeles, California ...

Bryan Burrough

Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of seven books, including the New York Times #1 best-selling Barbarians at the Gate (with John Helyar) and Public Enemies. His new book, Forget the Alamo (with long-time friends Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford), challenges the historical lore behind the iconic building....

Dan Chiasson

Dan Chiasson is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Math Campers, and a book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. He is the poetry critic for The New Yorker. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and...

Heather Clark

Heather Clark earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship; a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York; and a Visiting U.S. Fellowship...

Kia Corthron

Kia Corthronis a playwright and novelist. Moon and the Mars, her second novel, was released in August 2021. Her debut, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, was the winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Her plays have been produced nationally...

Robert Costa

Robert Costa is a national political reporter at The Washington Post, where he has worked since 2014. He previously served as moderator and managing editor of Washington Week on PBS and as a political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of...

Chard deNiord

Chard deNiord is the author of seven poetry collections include In My Unknowing, Interstate, Speaking in Turn: a collaboration with Tony Sanders; The Double Truth, Night Mowing, Sharp Golden Thorn, and Asleep in the Fire. DeNiord has also authored two books of interviews with renowned American poets, Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs: Reflections and Conversations with...

Maggie Doherty

Maggie Doherty teaches writing at Harvard, where she earned her PhD in English. She is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Nation, among...

Carol Diehl

Carol Diehl is an artist and art critic, a longtime Contributing Editor to Art in America, as well as a former slam poet at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. She’s won fellowships from the NY Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, PEN America, and for her blog, Art Vent,...

Thomas Dyja

Thomas Dyja worked in publishing for more than a decade before becoming a writer. Along with editing four anthologies, he’s written three novels, a biography of civil rights pioneer Walter White and The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, a New York Times Notable book, One Book...

Glory Edim

Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a Brooklyn-based book club and digital platform that celebrates the uniqueness of Black literature and sisterhood. In fall 2017 she organized the first-ever Well-Read Black Girl Festival. She has worked as a creative strategist for over ten years at startups...

W. Ralph Eubanks

W. Ralph Eubanks is the author of The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South, Ever Is a Long Time: A Journey into Mississippi’s Dark Past, and his new book, A Place Like Mississippi. He has contributed...

Peter Filkins

Peter Filkins is the Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Bard College at Simon's Rock and a visiting professor of literature at Bard College. He is the author of five books of poems: What She Knew, After Homer, Augustine's Vision, and The View We're Granted,...

Shanta Lee Gander

Shanta Lee Gander is a multidisciplinary artist who was the 2020 recipient of the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts. She was named as Diode Editions’ full-length book contest winner for her debut poetry compilation, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak in Woke Tongues and her second...

Ann Gengarelly

Ann Gengarelly has been a poet-in-the schools throughout Southeastern Vermont and neighboring Massachusetts and New Hampshire since 1980. She is Director of The Poetry Studio at her home in Marlboro, Vermont, where during the past twenty-five years she has offered after-school and summer workshop programs in poetry and art for students from...

Brattleboro Literary Festival 2020 Authors