About featured speaker JUSTIN CRONIN
Justin Cronin, a professor of English at Rice University, is the author of The Summer Guest, a Booksense national bestseller, and Mary and O’Neil, winner of both the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize for best debut fiction.
In 2010, Cronin’s blockbuster epic, The Passage, debuted at #3 on The New York Times Best Seller list. The first volume in a trilogy, Jennifer Egan calls it a “wild, headlong, sweeping extravaganza of a novel” which derives its power from its exploration of the same themes that Cronin has made his own in his two earlier novels: love, honor, courage, valor, and the bonds between parents and children. A #1 Indie Next Pick, named one of the “10 Best Novels of the Year” by Time Magazine, and on more than a dozen “Best Books of the Year” lists including those of The Washington Post, Esquire, U.S. News & World Report, and NPR/On Point. Men’s Journal says The Passage is “addictive, terrifying, and deeply satisfying. Not only is this one of the year’s best thrillers; it’s one of the best of the past decade—maybe one of the best ever.” The New York Times Book Review calls it “a blockbuster . . . astutely plotted and imaginative,” and Stephen King says, “Read this book and the ordinary world disappears.” Time Magazine says, “What makes The Passage special is the extraordinary level of verbal craft and psychological insight” that Cronin brings to the telling.
The Twelve, the second in the planned trilogy that began with The Passage, will be released in 2012, and a film based on The Passage is now under development.
Before Dinner Readers
Robert Boswell, co-holder of the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston, along with his wife Antonya Nelson, is the author of six novels, including Century’s Son, Mystery Ride, and Crooked Hearts; three story collections; a play; a cyberpunk novel; and two books of nonfiction. His most recent story collection, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, described by O, The Oprah Magazine, as “An unnerving, fascinating collection,” was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award in fiction. He has received numerous awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction, and the PEN West Award for Fiction. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Esquire, Colorado Review, and many other magazines. He and his family live in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. Boswell also teaches creative writing at the Warren Wilson MFA Program.
ZZ Packer’s debut short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, became a PEN/Faulkner finalist and a New York Times Notable Book, and was selected by John Updike for the Today Show Book Club. The New York Times Book Review says, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is a superb story, its wry and mournful tones bound together by a complex psychological portrait,” and the San Francisco Chronicle says, “Packer...has...a captivating eye for detail and...a bold and often thrilling usage of language and style.” Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope and The Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2004 and have been read on NPR’s “Selected Shorts”. Her nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Magazine, The American Prospect, Essence, O, The Believer and Salon. She is a contributor to The Huffington Post and has appeared several times as a commentator on NPR’s Talk of the Nation and on MSNBC. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers' Award, and was recently named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine, as well as one of America’s Best Young Novelists by Granta Magazine.
Ann Weisgarber learned the basics of creative writing from Inprint Writers Workshops. Her debut novel, The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, was first published in England where it was longlisted for the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the Orange Award for New Writers. Published by Penguin in the United States, it won the Texas Institute of Letters' Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction, the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Ohioana Award. It was a “Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers” book and an “Indie Next List Great Read.”Alice Walker called the novel "an indelibly affecting teaching story," and Jeffery Lent wrote that it is a "grand achievement of the first rate." The film rights have been optioned by actress Viola Davis. Ann, who lives in Sugar Land, Texas, recently completed her second novel, which takes place in Galveston during the 1900s.