The Authors Guild Foundation Guild Nights Featured Author Bios | Summer 2021
Dan Brown is the author of numerous number-one bestselling novels, including Origin, Digital Fortress, and The Da Vinci Code, one of the bestselling novels of all time. His novels are published in 52 languages around the world with 200 million copies in print. In 2005, Dan was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World by TIME Magazine. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Phillips Exeter Academy, where he spent time as an English teacher before turning his efforts to writing fulltime.
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of many books, including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, Pops, and the picture book The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man. He is the editor, with Ayelet Waldman, of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation.
Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen took an unusual route to a writing career. While on maternity leave from her work as a physician, Gerritsen began to write fiction. She gained nationwide acclaim for her first novel of medical suspense, the New York Times bestseller Harvest. She has written numerous medical thrillers, some of which feature Det. Rizzoli and Dr. Isles, which inspired the television series Rizzoli & Isles, starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander. She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award and the Rita Award.
The current poet laureate of Maine, Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, including his newest, Things Seemed to Be Breaking. He has also written The View from Here, a book of brief essays on craft and community. Stuart was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, for over 25 years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006.
Christina Baker Kline is a number-one New York Times bestselling author of eight novels, including The Exiles, Orphan Train, and A Piece of the World. She is published in 40 countries. Her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among other prizes, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, universities, and schools as One Book, One Read selections. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times and the NYT Book Review, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Psychology Today, and Slate.
Douglas Preston is the author of 36 books, both fiction and nonfiction, 29 of which have been New York Times bestsellers, with several reaching the number-one position. He has worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. His first novel, RELIC, co-authored with Lincoln Child, launched the famed Pendergast series of novels. He is the president of the Authors Guild Council.
The Authors Guild Foundation Guild Nights Featured Author Bios | Summer 2021
Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who uses facts and history to make observations about contemporary American politics. She teaches 19th-century American history at Boston College. Her early work focused on the transformation of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. She writes the wildly popular blog Letters from an American. Her latest book is How the South Won the Civil War.
Roxana Robinson is the author of six novels, three collections of short stories, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR.
Writer, film producer, and scholar, Jonathan Taplin is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Jon began his entertainment career in 1969 as tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973, he produced Martin Scorsese’s first feature film, Mean Streets, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS). He is the author of Move Fast and Break Things and The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life. He is a council member of the Authors Guild.
Ayelet Waldman is the author of the memoir A Really Good Day as well as novels including Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. She is the editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons and, with Michael Chabon, Fight of the Century.
Monica Wood is a novelist, memoirist, and playwright. Her most recent novel, The One-in-a- Million Boy, has been published in 22 languages in 30 countries and won a 2017 Nautilus Award (Gold) and the New England Society Book Award. She is also the author of When We Were the Kennedys, a winner of the May Sarton Memoir Award and the 2016 Maine Literary Award. Her novel Any Bitter Thing was an ABA bestseller and Book Sense Top Ten pick. Her other fiction includes Ernie’s Ark, which has been excerpted on NPR’s Selected Shorts; My Only Story, a finalist for the Kate Chopin Award; and Secret Language, her first novel.