On Saturday, January 27, at 4 pm, the Cornwall Library is starting off its 2024 book talks with an event that should enthrall literature fans throughout the area. Distinguished best-selling novelists and memoirists Dani Shapiro (Signal Fires, Inheritance) and A.M. Homes (The Unfolding, The Mistress’s Daughter) will discuss their work, with Roxana Robinson, celebrated novelist and biographer, moderating. The discussion will focus on how the authors choose subjects, choose genres, and choose how to respond to the great world.

Dani Shapiro is the author of eleven books, and host/creator of the hit podcast Family Secrets. Her novel Signal Fires was named a best book of 2022 by Time Magazine and others, and is a national bestseller. Her most recent memoir, Inheritance, a New York Times Bestseller, was named a best book of 2019 by Elle, Vanity Fair, Wired, and Real Simple. Both Signal Fires and Inheritance were National Jewish Book Award winners. Shapiro’s work has been published in fourteen languages and she’s currently adapting Signal Fires for television. Her book on the craft of writing, Still Writing, has just been reissued and she occasionally teaches workshops and retreats.

A.M. Homes’s work is translated into twenty-two languages and appears frequently in publications such as Harpers, The New Yorker, and Art Forum. Several times a year she collaborates on book projects with artists, among them Carroll Dunham of Cornwall. She has been a writer/producer on television shows including Mr. Mercedes and The L Word, and her novels This Book Will Save Your Life and May We Be Forgiven are now in development for television. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and NYFA, and she is active in writers’ organizations such as Yaddo and PEN. She teaches creative writing at Princeton.

Roxana Robinson is an author, professor, and environmentalist, and a scholar of American paintings. She has written six novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She teaches at Hunter College in New York City, and has received fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Robinson has served on the Boards of PEN and the Authors Guild, and was president of the Authors Guild from 2013-2017. In 2019 she received the Barnes and Noble “Writers for Writers Award.” She lives in Cornwall.

Live event only. Registration required at the library website: https://cornwalllibrary.org/events/

30 Pine Street
Cornwall, CT 06753

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