Writers Respond to Readers

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Writers Respond to Readers is an all-day author event designed for members of book clubs and others interested in literary discussion. Our visiting authors address a variety of topics intended to inform, intrigue, and ignite the imagination. Writers Respond to Readers is an opportunity for those with the spirit of inquiry and a passion for books to gather in pursuit of a more thoughtful approach to reading.

Our next Writers Respond to Readers will happen at the end of January, 2012. We hope you will join us!

Writers Respond to Readers 2011 was huge success and we want to thank the wonderful authors who shared with us their literary lives. See below for information about all of them.

Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starting Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, and The Keep, which was a national bestseller. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney's and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine. A 2002 cover story she wrote on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and her most recent article, The Bipolar Kid, received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Her new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in June and has been named as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2010.

Julie Orringer is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a novel, and How to Breathe Underwater, a short story collection. Her stories have been published in The Yale Review, where they've twice been awarded the Editors' Prize for best story of the year; the Paris Review, which awarded her the Discovery Prize in 1998; Ploughshares, which selected her work for the Cohen Award for Best Fiction; Zoetrope All-Story, which nominated her for a National Magazine Award; and by the Washington Post Magazine. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction. She is a 1996 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held a two-year Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 1999-2001, and was Stanford's Marsh McCall Lecturer in Fiction from 2001-2003. She has won numerous awards including LA Times Best Book of the Year, the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers' Award from the Jewish Community Foundation and a grant from National Endowment for the Arts for The Invisible Bridge.

Jess Walter is the author of five novels and one nonfiction book. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages and his essays, short fiction, criticism and journalism have been widely published, in such periodicals as Details, Playboy, Newsweek, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. His books include The Zero, which was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award, the 2007 PEN Center Literary Award and the 2007 LA Times Book Prize and winner of the 2007 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award; Citizen Vince, which won the 2005 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel and a finalist for the ITW Thriller of the Year award; Over Tumbled Graves, which was a 2001 New York Times notable book; Every Knee Shall Bow (rereleased as Ruby Ridge), a finalist for the PEN USA literary nonfiction award; and, most recently, The Financial Lives of the Poets (2009). Walter also writes screenplays and was the co-author of Christopher Darden's 1996 bestseller In Contempt.

Heidi Durrow is a graduate of Stanford, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Law School. She is the recipient of a Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Writers, a Jentel Foundation Residency, and won top honors in the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition and the Chapter One Fiction Contest. She has received grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the Roth Endowment and the American Antiquarian Society. She has also received Fellowships to the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony and the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference. She is the co-founder and co-producer of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival, an annual free public event. An occasional essay contributor to National Public Radio, she received Barbara Kingsolver's 2008 Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change for The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (Algonquin Books), her first novel, which has been hailed as one of the Best Novels of 2010 by the Washington Post, a Top 10 Buzz Book of 2010 by the Boston Herald and named a Top 10 Debut of 2010 by Booklist. Ebony magazine recently named Heidi one of its Power 100 Leaders of 2010 along with writers Edwidge Danticat, Malcolm Gladwell and Ntozake Shange.