Alison Lurie & Kate Blackwell
Alison Lurie is the author of nine novels including Foreign Affairs, which won the Pulitzer Prize, The Truth About Lorin Jones, which won the Prix Femina Etranger, and Truth and Consequences. Ms. Lurie has also published Women and Ghosts, a collection of supernatural stories; Familiar Spirits, a memoir of the poet James Merrill; and The Language of Clothes, a study of the psychology of fashion. She has written two collections of essays on children's literature, Don’t Tell the Grownups and Boys and Girls Forever, and three books of traditional folktales for children. Three of Ms Lurie's novels—Foreign Affairs, The War Between the Tates, and Imaginary Friends—have been adapted for television. She has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation grants, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita at Cornell University where she has taught literature, folklore, humor, and writing. She spends part of the summer in London and much of the winter in Key West, Florida. She is married to the writer Edward Hower and has three grown sons and three growing grandchildren.
Kate Blackwell's story collection, You Won’t Remember This, was published in June 2007. Novelist Howard Norman says, "Kate Blackwell has what Flannery O’Connor called ‘a talent for humanity.’ ... In each story, Blackwell looks at life with a direct gaze and she writes with elegant measured tones and with beautiful melancholy humor." Novelist Robert Bausch calls the book, "an extraordinary collection of stories all having to do with what is too often hushed in the human heart; it is full of characters you come to care for and trouble for which you cannot easily choose sides."