Traveling this holiday season? Listen to six of our most popular programs at 2017 #BKBF, thanks to the generous support of the Amazon Literary Partnership. Listen and recall the day-long literary extravaganza. Here’s the first …
The New Green Light: Views From America
Stephanie Powell Watts (No One Is Coming To Save Us), Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (A Kind of Freedom), and Julia Fierro (The Gypsy Moth Summer) cover many dimensions of the American landscape, from small towns to a destroyed city. In these novels, the interaction between one’s location and one’s aspirations heighten issues of race, love, and ambition. Moderated by Garrard Conley (Boy Erased).
About the Speakers
Garrard Conley (moderator)
Garrard Conley is the author of Boy Erased, named a top 2016 memoir by Oprah.com, Buzzfeed, Shelf Awareness, etc. and slated to become a feature film out from Focus Features in 2018. He has published work in Time, VICE, CNN, Buzzfeed Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. He currently teaches the Memoir Incubator class for GrubStreet and resides in Brooklyn, NY.
Stephanie Powell Watts
Stephanie Powell Watts is the author of the short story collection We Are Taking Only What We Need and her debut novel No One Is Coming to Save Us. She is an associate professor of English at Lehigh University, and she has won numerous awards, including a Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Southern Women’s Writers Award for Emerging Writer of the Year.
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Born and raised in New Orleans, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton studied creative writing at Dartmouth and law at UC Berkeley. A recipient of the Lombard fellowship, she spent a year in the Dominican Republic working for a civil rights organization and writing. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Limestone Journal, and Broad! Magazine. A Kind of Freedom is her debut novel.
Julia Fierro
Julia Fierro is the author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer, and Cutting Teeth. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Glamour, The Millions, Poets & Writers, and other publications, and she has been profiled in The Observer and The Economist. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Julia founded The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002, and it has grown into a creative home to 4,000 writers in New York City, Los Angeles and Online.
