Winner of The Mount’s 2010 Henry James Award

Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac, heard on public radio stations across the country, and the author of more than a dozen books, including Lake Wobegon Days, The Book of Guys, Love Me and Homegrown Democrat. He was born in Anoka, Minnesota, in 1942 and graduated from the University of Minnesota. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and daughter. He has two grandsons. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters and the Episcopal church. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Winner of The Mount’s 2010 Edith Wharton Achievement Award

Francine Prose is the author of fifteen books of fiction, most recently the highly acclaimed Goldengrove. The novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. Her non-fiction book Reading Like a Writer was a New York Times bestseller. A former president of PEN American Center, she lives in New York City. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Kurt Andersen is the author of two novels, the critically acclaimed bestsellers Heyday and Turn of the Century, and the recent nonfiction book Reset. He is host and co-creator of the Peabody-Award-winning public radio program Studio 360,  and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and New York magazines. In addition, he writes for film, television and the stage. Previously, he co-founded Spy magazine, and served as editor-in-chief of New York. He has also been a columnist and critic for New York, The New Yorker and Time. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

photo by Joan Griswold

Roy Blount Jr. is the author of twenty-one books. The first was an account of a year among the Pittsburgh Steelers, About Three Bricks Shy of a Load. The most recent are Alphabet Juice and Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South. The latter won the annual nonfiction award from the New England Independent Booksellers Association. Forthcoming are Hail, Hail Euphoria!: The Marx Brothers in Duck Soup (October), and Alphabetter Juice. He has contributed to many magazines, including Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and The Oxford American. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. In October he was awarded the Thomas Wolfe Prize by the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Elizabeth Brundage is the author of The Doctor’s Wife and Somebody Else’s Daughter. Her novel A Stranger Like You will be published by Viking in August. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a James Michener Award. Before attending Iowa, she was a screenwriting fellow at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.  Her short fiction has been published in a variety of literary journals including Greensboro Review, Witness Magazine, and New Letters. She lives with her husband and children in New York State and will be teaching at Skidmore College in the fall. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Frank Delaney was born in Tipperary, Ireland. He began as a broadcaster in his home country, working on documentaries and music programs, before moving into broadcast journalism. In the 1970s, he was hired by the BBC to cover Ireland’s current affairs during a time of particularly intense conflict. During these tumultuous years, Delaney reported on everything from bombings to kidnappings. Delaney subsequently moved to London, working in arts broadcasting. The program Bookshelf, which he inaugurated for BBC Radio Four, became an award winner; he also created Word of Mouth, BBC Radio Four’s highly rated show about language, and wrote and presented The Celts, a six part television series, seen in forty countries and still in active distribution. He has interviewed hundreds of writers, including most of the significant authors of our time. In 1979, Delaney’s first book, James Joyce’s Odyssey, was published to critical acclaim and best-seller status. He has published thirteen works of fiction, seven nonfiction books, and is currently working on a major series of novels, of which Ireland, Tipperary, Shannon, and Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show (February 2010) have so far been published, to rave reviews. [Event] [Festival Fundraiser] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Tad Friend has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. He writes the magazine’s Letter from California, including a recent analysis of campus protests in Berkeley, as well as short pieces such as a recent snapshot of Phyllis Diller at age 92. His most recent book, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago Tribune. Friend lives in Brooklyn and is married to the journalist Amanda Hesser, formerly the food editor of the New York Times Magazine, and was the title character in her second book, Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship, with Recipes. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Four-time Peabody Award winner, four-time Emmy Award winner, John Hockenberry has broad experience as a journalist and commentator for more than three decades. He has reported from all over the world, in virtually every medium, having anchored programs for network, cable, and radio and reported for magazines, newspapers, and online media. Currently, Hockenberry is host of the live public radio morning news program The Takeaway produced by Public Radio International and WNYC New York. For nine years Hockenberry served as a correspondent for the NBC newsmagazine “Dateline” and before that the ABC newsmagazine, “Day One.” While at NBC, Hockenberry also hosted and produced two groundbreaking programs for cable: Edgewise and Hockenberry. He hosted the first live-streamed audio news program over the Internet in 1999. Hockenberry is the author of A River Out of Eden, a novel based in the Pacific Northwest, and Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hockenberry and his wife, Alison, live in Brooklyn and Egremont, Mass., with their five children, Zoe, Olivia, Zachary, Regan and Ajax. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008), as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2003, Amazon included on its list of Best Memoirs of 2003, and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year 2003. She is working on a new book of poems concerned with various forms of management and a novel about a young woman with a fictitious brain dysfunction who lives in Las Vegas. A former VP at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan, Katy currently lives in Brooklyn, where she writes, reads, runs a small business from her home and practices yoga. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Elinor Lipman is the author of eight previous novels, including The Inn at Lake Devine and My Latest Grievance, winner of the Paterson Fiction Prize. In 2001 she won the New England Book Award for Fiction. The film Then She Found Me, directed by and starring Helen Hunt, is based on her first novel. She will be the Elizabeth Drew Chair in Creative Writing at Smith College for 2011-12.  Lipman lives in Massachusetts and New York City. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Martha McPhee is the author of the novels Dear Money, Bright Angel Time, Gorgeous Lies, and L’America. Her work has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2002 she was nominated for a National Book Award. Her novels have been Best Books of The Year on the New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune lists. Her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Newark Star Ledger, Vogue, More, Harper’s Bazaar, Self, Traveler, Travel & Leisure, among many others. She lives in New York City with her children and husband, the poet and writer Mark Svenvold. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

photo by Nancy Crampton

Laura Miller is a journalist and critic. She is a cofounder of Salon.com, where she is currently a staff writer, and is the editor of The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors. Miller is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, Time, and other publications. She lives in New York. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

photo by Gaspar Tringale

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992. She began contributing articles and Talk of the Town pieces in 1987. Before joining The New Yorker, Orlean was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and at Vogue, where she wrote on numerous figures in both the music and fashion industries. Previously, she had been a columnist, first for the Boston Phoenix and then for the Boston Globe Magazine. She has also written for the New York Times Magazine, Spy, Esquire, and Outside. Orlean is the author of seven books, including The Orchid Thief (1998), which inspired the movie Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze. She is at work on her eighth book, about dog actor Rin Tin Tin. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Ruth Reichl was Editor in Chief of Gourmet Magazine from 1999 to 2009. Before that she was the restaurant critic of both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. As co-owner of The Swallow Restaurant Collective from 1974 to 1977, she played a part in the culinary revolution that took place in Berkeley, California. In the years that followed, she served as restaurant critic for New West and California magazines. Reichl began writing about food in 1972, when she published Mmmmm: A Feastiary. Since then, she has authored four memoirs, Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires, and For You, Mom, Finally. She is the editor of The Modern Library Food Series, which currently includes ten books. She is also Executive Producer and host of the public television series, Adventures with Ruth. Ms. Reichl holds a B.A. and an M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan and lives in New York City with her husband, Michael Singer, a television news producer, and their son. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Katie Roiphe is the author of several books, including The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism and Uncommon Arrangements. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Slate, and Tin House, among many other places. She has a Ph.D. in literature from Princeton University and teaches at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

photo by Seth Armus

Elizabeth Samet is the author of Soldier’s Heart, a memoir, and Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776-1898. She received her Ph.D. in English literature from Yale and has been an English professor at West Point since 1996. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

Dani Shapiro’s most recent books include Black & White (Knopf, 2007), Family History (Knopf, 2003) and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Bookforum, Oprah, and Ploughshares, among others, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and guest editor of Best New American Voices 2010. Her new memoir, Devotion, was published in February, 2010. She lives with her husband and son in Litchfield County, Connecticut. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and two previous collections of stories, including: Love and Hydrogen, Project X, Nosferatu, Batting Against Castro, and Paper Doll. His 2007 National Book Award Finalist for fiction, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, recently won the fourth annual Story Prize. His stories have been widely anthologized, and included in the Best American Short Stories three times (1994, 2002, and 2006). He was awarded a Pushcart Prize for “Hadrian’s Wall” in 2006, the Library of  Congress/Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction for Project X in 2005, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Award in 2005. He has been a Writer-in-Residence or Distinguished Visiting Writer on campuses across the country, including Brown University, the University of Michigan, Vassar College, and the University of California at Irvine. He presently teaches writing and film at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Tatjana Soli is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Salzburg, Austria, she attended Stanford University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Her debut novel, The Lotus Eaters, was published by St. Martin’s Press in April 2010. Her stories have appeared in The Sun, StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Third Coast, Sonora Review, and North Dakota Quarterly among other publications. Her work has been twice cited in Best American Short Stories and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize, the Dana Award, finalist for the Bellwether Prize, and received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives with her husband in Orange County, California. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

photo by Brigitte Lacombe

Judith Thurman is the author of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette and Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award and served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s Oscar-winning film Out of Africa. A staff writer at The New Yorker, she lives in New York City. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

photo by Setsuko Winchester

Simon Winchester’s many books include The Professor and the Madman, The Man Who Loved China, The Map that Changed the World, Krakatoa, and A Crack in the Edge of the World. Each of these have both been New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. Mr. Winchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by HM The Queen in 2006. He lives in western Massachusetts. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Deborah Bernhardt has received fellowships and grants from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellowship), the Wisconsin Arts Board (Literary Arts Grant), Penn State Altoona (Writer-in-Residence), Writers@Work, Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Hessen Literary Society, Germany. She received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and used the Second Year Poetry Fellowship (2008-2009) to work on a new manuscript. Her first collection, Echolalia, was published by Four Way Books in 2006 as winner of the Intro Prize for Poetry. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

Abbot Cutler has published two collections of poems and teaches writing and literature at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Massachusetts. He is a member of Slate Roof Press, a member-run press committed to publishing Franklin County poets. He lives in Ashfield, Mass. [Event] [Full Schedule]

Peter Filkins is the author of three books of poems, the most recent title being Augustine’s Vision. He is the recipient of the Stover Award in Poetry, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Award, and a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. He is also the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry and fiction and the novels of H. G. Adler. His work has appeared in Poetry, The N.Y. Times Book Review, L.A. Times Book Review, The New Republic, Narrative, and numerous other journals. He teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

Hannah Fries is assistant editor and poetry editor of Orion, a bimonthly literary and arts magazine about the intersections of nature, culture, and place, based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.  Her poems have appeared recently in the journals faultline and PMS: poemmemoirstory. Fries received her MFA from Warren Wilson College in July. [Event] [Full Schedule]

Michelle Gillett has two published books: Rock & Spindle, a letter press chapbook (Mad River Press, 1998); and Blinding the Goldfinches, selected by Hayden Carruth as winner of the Backwaters Poetry Prize and published in 2005. She has won a poetry awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and published work in literary magazines and poetry journals. She received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. Gillett is also an Op-ed columnist for The Berkshire Eagle and a contributing editor of The Women’s Times, the monthly publication for women in western Massachusetts. She teaches writing workshops and, with her partner, runs G & R Editing, Consulting and Book Development. Gillett and her husband have two grown daughters and live in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

Leslie Harrison’s first book, Displacement, won the 2008 Bakeless Prize in poetry from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. It was published last July by Mariner Books, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Widely published in journals, including Poetry, The New Republic, and Memorious, Harrison’s work was recently selected for inclusion in the Dzanc Books Best of the Web print anthology. She has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Bakeless Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives in Sandisfield, Massachusetts, with her two dogs. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Books]

Lawrence Raab is the author of seven collections of poems, including The History of Forgetting (Penguin 2009). A winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award, he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches literature and writing at Williams College. [Event] [Full Schedule] [Book]

Tess Taylor grew up in El Cerrito, California, and holds degrees from Amherst College, New York University, and Boston University. Her collection of poems The Misremembered World was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and her work has since appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Harvard Review, Literary Imagination, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. Tess currently writes “STANZA,” the Barnes and Noble Review’s column on poets and poetry. She is the 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Resident in Lenox, Massachusetts. She also works one day a week on an organic farm. [Event] [Full Schedule]

Susan Arbetter is the Albany-based State Capitol Correspondent and News & Public Affairs Director for WCNY Syracuse Public Television. Prior to her move in September of 2009 to WCNY, Susan created, hosted, and produced the Edward R. Murrow award-winning New York Now, the leading statewide government and public affairs television program in New York State. Before making the leap to television in April, 2007, Susan created, hosted, and produced the award-winning Roundtable Show on WAMC Northeast Public Radio. A graduate of Boston University, she has worked in radio for 20 years. She and her husband, Albany Times Union “Speaking of Nature” columnist and Massachusetts-based teacher Bill Danielson, live in Altamont, New York. [Event] [Full Schedule]

Joe Donahue talks to people on the radio for a living. He hosts WAMC Northeast Public Radio programs The Roundtable and In Our Backyard with Ward Stone, and is currently filling in as host of The Book Show. In addition to countless human interviews, he has talked to a lot of Muppets. He grew up in Philadelphia, has been on the area airwaves for more than 25 years, and currently lives in Washington County, NY, with his wife, Kelly, and their dog, Sophie. [Event] [Full Schedule]

Louisa Gilder is the author of The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn, one of only five science books on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2009. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 2000 and lives in Tyringham, Mass., with her family, one dog, three goats, and 24 chickens. [Event] [Full Schedule]