The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library present Breakfast with the Authors, moderated by Dr. Suzanne Koven. The CFA 2020 Breakfast with the Authors online features celebrated literary authors Adrienne Brodeur (Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me), Caroline Leavitt (With or Without You), and Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop). Grab your favorite breakfast treats and join the conversation!
Suzanne Koven, received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. After her residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and has practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for 30 years. In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The New Yorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications.
Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me, which was described by The New York Times Book Review as: “Exquisite and harrowing. . . . The book is so gorgeously written and deeply insightful, and with a line of narrative tension that never slacks, from the first page to the last, that it’s one you’ll likely read in a single, delicious sitting.” Published in October 2019 by HMH Books, Wild Game’s film rights were bought by Chernin Entertainment with Kelly Fremon Craig, the director of Edge of Seventeen, attached to adapt and direct. Adrienne’s publishing career began with founding the fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, where she served as editor in chief from 1996-2002. The magazine has won the prestigious National Magazine Award for best fiction four times. In 2005, she became an editor at Harcourt (later, HMH Books), where she acquired and edited literary fiction and memoir. Adrienne left publishing in 2013 to become Creative Director — and later Executive Director — of Aspen Words, a literary arts nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. In 2017, she launched the Aspen Words Literary Prize, a $35,000 annual award for an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.
Marjan Kamali is the author of The Stationery Shop (Gallery/Simon&Schuster) and Together Tea (Ecco/HarperCollins). Marjan is a novelist and teacher whose work has been translated into a dozen languages, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and adapted for the stage. The Stationery Shop was a Boston Globe best-seller, one of NPR’s best books of 2019, one of Newsweek’s 30 Best Summer Books, an Indie Next Pick, and named to numerous “Best Books of 2019” lists. Marjan’s debut novel, Together Tea, was a Massachusetts Book Award Finalist, an NPR WBUR Good Read, and a Target Emerging Author Selection. Marjan graduated from U.C. Berkeley, and earned an MBA from Columbia University and an MFA from NYU.
Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Cruel Beautiful World, Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines, Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Various titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines. Her many essays, stories, book reviews and articles have appeared in Salon, Psychology Today, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New York Times Modern Love, Publisher’s Weekly, People, Real Simple, New York Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and numerous anthologies. She won First Prize in Redbook Magazine’s Young Writers Contest for her short story, “Meeting Rozzy Halfway,” which grew into the novel. The recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Award for Fiction for Into Thin Air, she was also a National Magazine Award nominee for personal essay, and she was awarded an honorable mention, Goldenberg Prize for Fiction from the Bellevue Literary Review, for “Breathe,” a portion of Pictures of You.
For more details, please visit www.concordfestivalofauthors.org.
