Ann Hood is the author of over a dozen novels, including the international bestsellers The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most. Her debut novel, the bestseller Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, has been in print since 1987. She has also written five memoirs, including Fly Girl, which is about her days as a TWA flight attendant in the 1970s and 80s; and Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which is the story of her five-year-old daughter Grace from a virulent form of strep in 2002. The book was a NYT Editors’ Choice and was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly.

Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food and Wine, Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and many more.

She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing awards, a Best American Travel Writing award, and a Best American Spiritual Writing award,

Hood’s most recent book is the novel The Stolen Child. She lives in Providence RI and New York City with her husband, the writer Michael Ruhlman.

Luis Alberto Urrea, a Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is the author of 19 books, winning numerous awards for his poetry, fiction and essays. His latest novel, Good Night Irene, was an instant New York Times bestseller and is based on his mother’s service as a Red Cross “Donut Dolly” serving troops on the frontlines of the European theater in WWII. The Devil’s Highway, Urrea’s 2004 non-fiction account of a group of Mexican immigrants lost in the Arizona desert, won the Lannan Literary Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Pacific Rim Kiriyama Prize. His novel, The House of Broken Angels, was a 2018 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction award for his collection of short stories, The Water Museum, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Urrea’s novel Into the Beautiful North is a Big Read selection of the National Endowment of the Arts. He is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Andre Dubus III’s nine books include the New York Times’ bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie. His most recent novel, Such Kindness, was published in June 2023, and a collection of personal essays, Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin, was published in March 2024. He is also the editor of Reaching Inside: 50 Acclaimed Authors on 100 Unforgettable Short Stories, (Godine, 2023.) His novella and story collection, Our Possible Life, is forthcoming in 2027. 

Mr. Dubus has been a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and is a recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages, and he teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Madeleine Blais is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, finalist for the National Book Critics award, and author of two memoirs (Uphill Walkers, about her Irish Catholic family in western Massachusetts,  and To the New Owners, about a house on Martha’s Vineyard that belonged to her husband’s family)), a collection of essays (The Heart is an Instrument), a nonfiction narrative hailed by ESPN as one of the top hundred sports books of the twentieth century (In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle) and a full-scale biography of a once famous, now forgotten female athlete (Queen of the Court: The Many Lives of Tennis Legend Alice Marble, optioned by Red Bull Studios). A professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst she has been a guest lecturer and/or writer in residence at various institutions including Florida International University, Warren Willson College,, Harvard School of Education, Brown, Columbia, Princeton,  MIT, Holyoke Community College, Springfield Technical College, and the Penn State.  Her current project is set in Miami in the eighties when she was a reporter at the Miami Herald and when Miami was widely regarded as the most dangerous place on earth.

Melanie Brooks is the author of the books A Hard Silence: One Daughter Remaps Family, Grief, and Faith When HIV/AIDS Changes It All (Vine Leaves Press, 2023) and Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma (Beacon Press, 2017). She teaches creative nonfiction in the M.F.A. programs at Bay Path University and Western Connecticut State University and professional writing at Northeastern University. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast writing program and a Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. She has had numerous interviews and essays on topics ranging from loss and grief to parenting and aging published in The Boston Globe, HuffPost, The Globe and Mail, Yankee, The Washington Post, Psychology Today, Ms. Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, and more. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, two children (when they are home from adult lives away), and two Labs. For more information visit: www.melaniebrooks.com

Karen Karbo is the author of seventeen books, including the international bestsellers The Gospel According to Coco Chanel and In Praise of Difficult Women. Her three novels have all been named New York Times Notable Books, and her memoir, The Stuff of Life, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. She is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Fiction. A longtime teacher of fiction and memoir, she is the founder of Come to Your Senses Writing Retreats in Collioure, France, where she has lived since 2019.