What do James Baldwin, Aaron Copeland, Delmore Schwartz, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Roth, Sylvia Plath, Milton Avery, Ned Rorem, Carson McCullers… have in common? They’ve all spent long, quiet hours working at Yaddo. And soon I will too! I’m honored to have received an invitation to be in residence at this storied artist community…(Read More)

I’ve joined the Novel Network, a innovative new venture that connects book groups with authors. On Novel Network, everything is nicely curated with a handy, regularly updated calendar, and book groups can use its services for free. If you’d like to know more about it, take a look here…(Read More)

“Tales from Here and There: On Ugandan Literary Culture,” which appeared in the Millions, was one of my all-time favorite essays to research and write: “All of this pioneering activity in Kampala might seem to have laid fertile ground for the emergence in the 1960s and 1970s of a powerful Ugandan writerly tradition. Certainly…(Read More)

This year’s 32nd Salon du Livre de Genève will turn a spotlight on New York City and, on April 26, I’ll have the honor of being in conversation with brilliant political cartoonist Chappatte and former Swiss Consul General in NY François Barral as part of the festivities. Author Louise Anne Bouchard…(Read More)

Being in conversation with fellow expat author Susan Jane Gilman, on the pluses and minuses of working as an expat writer, already promised to be fun. Then the snows started falling and Saturday and Sunday writing workshops were added to my schedule for the 2018 Geneva Writers Conference. What a great conference! Such a pleasure…(Read More)

Nothing makes my day like having a reader (and, in this case, fellow writer) love one of my books so much s/he wants to turn back to page one and start all over: “When I was asked to review a book I love for Off the Shelf, I thought immediately of An Unexpected Guest…(Read More)

“[A] lovely surprise…  It reminded me a great deal of Commonwealth… The narrative moves quickly through time, sometimes jumping nearly a decade forward, and still feels well paced. I really enjoyed this one, and will be thinking of these vivid characters for some time.” Well, here we go with another comparison to Ann Patchett’s…(Read More)

“Their new blended family is as much Americana as apple pie and Coke, shifting, changing and transforming through the decades as Barbara, her children, and her grandchildren create a legacy from the life and also the death of Michael Gannon.” Book critic Adriana Delgado had an original interpretation of Shining Sea and asked original, piercing…(Read More)

There’s nothing like doing an interview with an incredibly engaged, enthusiastic reviewer. Shining Sea’s working title was An American Family, and I’ve always felt the tale was universal–but some of the similarities between the story and interviewer Michelle Marie Dunton’s own life were uncanny. I may appear a little drained…(Read More)

When I’m deep in the first draft of writing a new novel, I don’t typically read other authors’ fiction for pleasure. What about other novelists? Do they? And has becoming a novelist interfered with their fiction-reading pleasure? I investigated. “I read like a coyote loose among sheep…” To read the rest in…(Read More)