A Celebration of Authors 2017

        Please join us for an extraordinary evening of cocktails, food and  conversation with five celebrated authors to benefit the programs and                              services of the Worcester Public Library. 

Thursday, October 26, 2017 -  5:30-9:00 p.m.

         The White Room @ Crompton Collective 138 Green Street           Worcester, MA 

When

Andre Dubus III grew up in mill towns on the Merrimack River along the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. He is the author of six books including three New York Times bestsellers. House of Sand and Fog was a #1 New York Times bestseller, a fiction finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Booksense Book of the Year. It was also an Oprah Book Club Selection, and was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated motion picture starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. The Garden of Last Days is soon to be a major motion picture. His memoir, Townie, was a #4 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Editors Choice. Dirty Love was chosen as a Notable Book and Editors’ Choice from the New York Times, a Notable Fiction from The Washington Post, and a Kirkus Starred Best Book of 2013. Mr. Dubus has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, Two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages.

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John Dufresne is the author of two short story collections, The Way That Water Enters Stone and Johnny Too Bad, and the novels Louisiana Power & Light, and Love Warps the Mind a Little, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He is also the author of Deep in the Shade of Paradise; Requiem, Mass; No Regrets, Coyote; and I Don’t Like Where This is Going. He has written two books on writing fiction, The Lie That Tells a Truth and Is Life Like This? He is the editor of the anthologies Blue Christmas, Everything is Broken, and Everything is Broken, Too. His short stories have twice been named Best American Mystery Stories, in 2007 and 2010. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction.

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Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She has taught in numerous writing programs including Emerson College, Boston University, Bowdoin College and the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program, and is the author of a collection of stories and eight novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture, and The Flight of Gemma Hardy, which won the New England Independent Booksellers’ Award in fiction for 2012. She lives in Cambridge, MA and is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her novel, Mercury, was published in September 2016. In July 2017, Tin House will publish The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. 

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Elizabeth Searle is the author of five books of fiction, most recently her novel We Got Him (2016), which is set on the night of the Boston Marathon bombing manhunt.  Her previous books are Girl Held in Home; A Four-Sided Bed, now in development as a feature film; Celebrities in Disgrace, produced as a short film, and My Body to You, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Prize.  Elizabeth's original stage work, Tonya & Nancy: The Rock Opera has been produced in Boston, LA, Chicago, NYC and has drawn national media attention.  Elizabeth's work has appeared in over a dozen anthologies; she is the co-editor of a new anthology: Soap Opera Confidential: Writers and Soap Insiders on Why We'll Tune in Tomorrow as the World Turns Restlessly by the Guiding Light of Our Lives.

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Winner of the Robert Olen Butler Prize for Fiction, Annie Weatherwax’s short stories have appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, for years, she earned a living sculpting superheroes and cartoon characters for Nickelodeon, DC Comics, Pixar and others. She has written extensively on the link between visual art and language including for Publishers Weekly, The New York Times and regularly for Ploughshares magazine. Her debut novel, All We Had, now a major motion picture, was published by Scribner and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award.

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Joe Cox, Moderator, is President of the EcoTarium, New England's leading science and nature center.