Barbara O’Neal fell in love with food and restaurants at the age of fifteen, when she landed a job in a Greek café and served baklava for the first time. She sold her first novel in her twenties, and has since won a plethora of awards, including two Colorado Book Awards and six prestigous RITAs, including one for THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS in 2010. Her novels have been published widely in Europe and Australia, and she travels internationally, presenting workshops, hiking hundreds of miles, and of course, eating. She lives with her partner, a British endurance athlete, and their collection of cats and dogs, in Colorado Springs. Here she talks about recovering memories on Christmas.
Sarah Addison Allen is the New York Times Bestselling author of GARDEN SPELLS (2007) THE SUGAR QUEEN (2008) THE GIRL WHO CHASED THE MOON (2010) and THE PEACH KEEPER (2011). She was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina. Here she talks about anticipation on Christmas Eve...or early Christmas morning.
Like her protagonist, Jean Kwok was born in Hong Kong. Along with her family, she immigrated to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. After entering public elementary school unable to speak a word of English, she was later admitted to Hunter College High School, one of New York City’s most competitive public high schools. She won early admission to Harvard, where she worked as many as four jobs at a time and graduated with honors in English and American literature, before going on to earn an MFA in fiction at Columbia. She has worked as an English teacher and Dutch-English translator at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In addition, she has been a professional ballroom dancer, a reader for the blind, a housekeeper, a dishwasher, and a computer graphics specialist for a major financial institution. Her work has been published in Story magazine, Prairie Schooner, and the NuyorAsian Anthology. Here she talks about how she came to understand Christmas.
Mira Bartók is a Chicago-born artist and writer and the author of twenty-eight books for children. Her writing has appeared in several literary journals and anthologies, and has been noted in The Best American Essays series. She lives in western Massachusetts, where she runs Mira List, a blog that helps artists find funding and residences all over the world. She has received awards from such organizations as the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation, the Associated Writing Programs, the Illinois Arts Council, Pollock-Krasner Grant, and the Carnegie Fund for Writers. Here she talks about the Christmas she spent in the Arctic while on a Fulbright Fellowship.
December 20, 2011
The following are lists of books releasing the weeks of December 19th and December 26th that we think will be of interest to Bookreporter.com readers.
Ellen Meister is the author of three novels. Her most recent book, THE OTHER LIFE (Putnam/Berkley), appears on several Best Fiction of the Year lists, was singled out by the American Booksellers Association for the prestigious Indie Next List, and is under option with HBO for a television series. She currently edits manuscripts for published and aspiring authors, teaches creative writing at Hofstra University Continuing Education, does public speaking about writing-related issues, and is at work on her fourth novel FAREWELL, DOROTHY PARKER (Putnam, 2013). Here she talks about gifting books in harder times during the holidays.
Donna M. Johnson is the author of HOLY GHOST GIRL, a new memoir that has been acclaimed by numerous publications and blogs, including the New York Times, O Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and People Magazine. She writes about religion for the Psychology Today blog, the Dallas Morning News, and the Austin American Statesman. Donna was awarded a writing residency by the Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL) in Spring 2009 and won the Mayborn Creative Nonfiction Prize for the Holy Ghost Girl manuscript in progress in 2007. She lives in Austin with her husband, the poet and author Kirk Wilson. Here she talks about THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE AND HIS TRAVELING CLOAK, one of the only things she has retained from when she was a little girl.
