Julia Older
Julia Older's obsession with the real François Vase in Florence, Italy, led both to her radio play) and the book-length poem. The 25-century journey of the vase winds through subterranean stories of greed passion and terror. Etruscans spilled sheep's blood over her lip. Millennia of Roman troops, hiding Christian martyrs, tomb looters left her broken and shattered until adventurer Alessandro François came along. Twice it was smashed into 600-plus pieces, came unglued and was puzzled together—each time with a piece missing. A third time—during the 1966 flood, a scientist intentionally broke the vase. He restored the missing fragment and at last was whole. The poem is illustrated with lively vase figures from Homer's Iliad, includes a "backstory" with Older's research (translated from Italian) and the original award-winning NPR drama on CD.
JULIA OLDER has written poetry, essays, fiction, non-fiction and plays. Four of her eleven poetry books are booklength poems, including the
mythical journey of Hermaphroditus in America and Tahirih Unveiled, based on the life of Persia's first women's rights
activist. Literary honors include a First Hopwood Poetry Award from the University of Michigan, Mary Roberts Rinehart Grant for
Prose, North Carolina First Poetry Book Grant, Independent Publisher Bronze Poetry Medal, First Daniel Varoujian Poetry
Award, several Pushcart Nominations, and fellowships to the Iowa Poetry Workshop, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony.
Older has lived and worked in France, Italy, Mexico, and Brazil. Her literary translations and commissions include the poems of
Sicilian Nobel Prize Winner Salvatore Quasimodo, an anthology of French-African poetry, Tahirih's Persian ghazals, and the story collection Blues for a Black Cat by Boris Vian (University of Nebraska Press French Modernist Series, with a new edition from the French Embassy in New Delhi, India). Two historical novels from Older's Isles of Shoals Trilogy were featured in Reading Group Choices national guidebook—The Island Queen, about celebrated Shoals writer Celia Thaxter, and This Desired Place, a 17th century New World saga which won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Best Northeast Regional Fiction (New England and New York). Julia's memoir, Appalachian Odyssey, recounts her adventure as the 19th woman to walk the 2000-mile Appalachian Trail and also contains many poems written en route. The Authors Guild selected the memoir for their Back-in-Print Series, and it received the National Outdoor Book Awards Classic Honorable Mention as “a lasting book that has proven to be a significant work in the field.” Other work by Older appears in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, Entelechy International, New Directions, Amazon Shorts, Sisters of the Earth: Women Writing about Nature, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She writes from her studio in the foothills of Grand Monadnock, New Hampshire.
JULIA OLDER has written poetry, essays, fiction, non-fiction and plays. Four of her eleven poetry books are booklength poems, including the
mythical journey of Hermaphroditus in America and Tahirih Unveiled, based on the life of Persia's first women's rights
activist. Literary honors include a First Hopwood Poetry Award from the University of Michigan, Mary Roberts Rinehart Grant for
Prose, North Carolina First Poetry Book Grant, Independent Publisher Bronze Poetry Medal, First Daniel Varoujian Poetry
Award, several Pushcart Nominations, and fellowships to the Iowa Poetry Workshop, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony.
Older has lived and worked in France, Italy, Mexico, and Brazil. Her literary translations and commissions include the poems of
Sicilian Nobel Prize Winner Salvatore Quasimodo, an anthology of French-African poetry, Tahirih's Persian ghazals, and the story collection Blues for a Black Cat by Boris Vian (University of Nebraska Press French Modernist Series, with a new edition from the French Embassy in New Delhi, India). Two historical novels from Older's Isles of Shoals Trilogy were featured in Reading Group Choices national guidebook—The Island Queen, about celebrated Shoals writer Celia Thaxter, and This Desired Place, a 17th century New World saga which won the Independent Publisher Gold Medal for Best Northeast Regional Fiction (New England and New York). Julia's memoir, Appalachian Odyssey, recounts her adventure as the 19th woman to walk the 2000-mile Appalachian Trail and also contains many poems written en route. The Authors Guild selected the memoir for their Back-in-Print Series, and it received the National Outdoor Book Awards Classic Honorable Mention as “a lasting book that has proven to be a significant work in the field.” Other work by Older appears in Poets & Writers, The New Yorker, Entelechy International, New Directions, Amazon Shorts, Sisters of the Earth: Women Writing about Nature, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She writes from her studio in the foothills of Grand Monadnock, New Hampshire.
Ernest Hebert
Ernest Hebert is a Keene, New Hampshire, native, a tenured Professor of English at Dartmouth College, and the author of nine novels that include the six-book Darby series, an historical novel, The Old American, and two future fiction novels, Mad Boys and I Love U, both on the Kindle. In the summer of 2007, he published NH Patterns, a book of personal essays accompanying photographs by Jon Gilbert Fox of Hanover.
The New England Book Sellers Association chose Hebert as their Fiction Author of the Year for 2006, and his most recent novel, Spoonwood, won an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) for the Best Regional Novel in the Northeast for 2006.
The Dogs of March, Hebert's first novel, was cited for excellence by the Hemingway Foundation. Mad Boys and The Old American received awards for excellence by the New Hampshire Writers Project, and Spoonwood won an IPPY for best regional novel in the Northeast in 2006. Hebert is also a winner of the Sarah Josepha Hale award for lifetime achievement.
He has been married to Medora Lavoie of Dover, NH, since 1969. They have two grown daughters.
Grandparents on both sides of Hebert's family migrated from French Canada to New Hamsphire in the early part of the 20th century.
French was my first language (just like Jack Landry, the protagonist of Never Back Down) and like Jack I refused to speak it after a bad experiences in kindergarten. To this day I am blocked in my ability to speak French, a great regret. My mother was raised on the West side of Manchester in the Franco-American tradition. I'm named after her brother, Monsignor Joseph Ernest Vaccarest, who was pastor of St. Marie's and St. Edmond's parishes in Manchester, and who was also my first mentor. His sudden death when I was fourteen remains the single most traumatic episode of my life. Besides French my bloodlines include ancestry from Italy, Scotland, England and as my mother confessed on her death bed, native America, a revelation which greatly prodded me to write my historical novel, The Old American.
I made a momentous decision when I was 23 to quit a good job with the telephone company and go to college. Never Back Down is my life if I hadn't gone to college. The book is about fifty percent autobiographical. It's the first book I've written where I used a version of myself as the protagonist. I wanted to write a realistic book in some depth about a working man and his progress through the time period I've lived in. Big events make the news and make the history, but it's our own personal events that make us who we are, and those events are often outside of the wars, the catastrophes, and the cultural upheavals that are reported by the media. It's these personal events that interest me as a writer.
My hobbies are road tripping (which I use to plot novels as I'm driving), computer painting, sculpting with wood, and cutting wood to burn in our wood stove.
The New England Book Sellers Association chose Hebert as their Fiction Author of the Year for 2006, and his most recent novel, Spoonwood, won an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) for the Best Regional Novel in the Northeast for 2006.
The Dogs of March, Hebert's first novel, was cited for excellence by the Hemingway Foundation. Mad Boys and The Old American received awards for excellence by the New Hampshire Writers Project, and Spoonwood won an IPPY for best regional novel in the Northeast in 2006. Hebert is also a winner of the Sarah Josepha Hale award for lifetime achievement.
He has been married to Medora Lavoie of Dover, NH, since 1969. They have two grown daughters.
Grandparents on both sides of Hebert's family migrated from French Canada to New Hamsphire in the early part of the 20th century.
French was my first language (just like Jack Landry, the protagonist of Never Back Down) and like Jack I refused to speak it after a bad experiences in kindergarten. To this day I am blocked in my ability to speak French, a great regret. My mother was raised on the West side of Manchester in the Franco-American tradition. I'm named after her brother, Monsignor Joseph Ernest Vaccarest, who was pastor of St. Marie's and St. Edmond's parishes in Manchester, and who was also my first mentor. His sudden death when I was fourteen remains the single most traumatic episode of my life. Besides French my bloodlines include ancestry from Italy, Scotland, England and as my mother confessed on her death bed, native America, a revelation which greatly prodded me to write my historical novel, The Old American.
I made a momentous decision when I was 23 to quit a good job with the telephone company and go to college. Never Back Down is my life if I hadn't gone to college. The book is about fifty percent autobiographical. It's the first book I've written where I used a version of myself as the protagonist. I wanted to write a realistic book in some depth about a working man and his progress through the time period I've lived in. Big events make the news and make the history, but it's our own personal events that make us who we are, and those events are often outside of the wars, the catastrophes, and the cultural upheavals that are reported by the media. It's these personal events that interest me as a writer.
My hobbies are road tripping (which I use to plot novels as I'm driving), computer painting, sculpting with wood, and cutting wood to burn in our wood stove.
Willem Lange
Willem Lange was born in 1935. A child of deaf parents, he grew up speaking sign language and first came to New England to prep school in 1950 as an alternative to reform school in his native New York State.
During a few absences from New England, Will earned a degree in only nine years at the College of Wooster in Ohio. In between those scattered semesters, he worked as a ranch hand, Adirondack guide, preacher, construction laborer, bobsled run announcer, assembly line worker, cab driver, bookkeeper, and bartender. After graduating in 1962, he taught high school English in northern New York, filling in summers as an Outward Bound instructor.
From 1968 to 1972 Will directed the Dartmouth Outward Bound Center. During the ensuing thirty-five years he was a building and remodeling contractor in Hanover. He’s an adopted member of the Dartmouth Class of 1957.
In 1981 he began writing a weekly column, “A Yankee Notebook,” which appears in several New England newspapers. He’s a commentator for Vermont Public Radio and the host of New Hampshire Public Television’s weekly show Windows to the Wild. His annual readings of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol began in 1975 and continue unabated. He’s published eight books and received an Emmy Award for one of his films on New Hampshire Public Television.
In 1973 Will founded the Geriatric Adventure Society, a group of outdoor enthusiasts whose members have skied the 200-mile Alaska Marathon, climbed in Alaska, the Andes, and Himalayas, bushwhacked on skis through northern New England, and paddled rivers north of the Arctic Circle.
He and his wife, Ida, have been married since 1959. They moved from New Hampshire to Vermont in 2007, and now live in East Montpelier. They have three children and four grandchildren.
During a few absences from New England, Will earned a degree in only nine years at the College of Wooster in Ohio. In between those scattered semesters, he worked as a ranch hand, Adirondack guide, preacher, construction laborer, bobsled run announcer, assembly line worker, cab driver, bookkeeper, and bartender. After graduating in 1962, he taught high school English in northern New York, filling in summers as an Outward Bound instructor.
From 1968 to 1972 Will directed the Dartmouth Outward Bound Center. During the ensuing thirty-five years he was a building and remodeling contractor in Hanover. He’s an adopted member of the Dartmouth Class of 1957.
In 1981 he began writing a weekly column, “A Yankee Notebook,” which appears in several New England newspapers. He’s a commentator for Vermont Public Radio and the host of New Hampshire Public Television’s weekly show Windows to the Wild. His annual readings of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol began in 1975 and continue unabated. He’s published eight books and received an Emmy Award for one of his films on New Hampshire Public Television.
In 1973 Will founded the Geriatric Adventure Society, a group of outdoor enthusiasts whose members have skied the 200-mile Alaska Marathon, climbed in Alaska, the Andes, and Himalayas, bushwhacked on skis through northern New England, and paddled rivers north of the Arctic Circle.
He and his wife, Ida, have been married since 1959. They moved from New Hampshire to Vermont in 2007, and now live in East Montpelier. They have three children and four grandchildren.
Indira Ganesan
Indira Ganesan is the author of three novels, As Sweet As Honey (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), Inheritance (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), and
The Journey (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). She has held fellowships from The Paden Institute for Writers of Color, The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, The W.K.Rose Fellowship, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Selected as one of 52 Best Young American Novelists under Forty in Granta’s 1995 campaign for her first novel, her second novel was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Book. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Antaeus, Black Renaissance, Bombay Gin, Half and Half: Writers on Biracialism & Biculturalism, Glamour, Mississippi Review, Seventeen, and Newsday-Long Island.
The Journey (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990). She has held fellowships from The Paden Institute for Writers of Color, The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, The W.K.Rose Fellowship, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Selected as one of 52 Best Young American Novelists under Forty in Granta’s 1995 campaign for her first novel, her second novel was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers Book. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Antaeus, Black Renaissance, Bombay Gin, Half and Half: Writers on Biracialism & Biculturalism, Glamour, Mississippi Review, Seventeen, and Newsday-Long Island.
Eleanor Morse
Eleanor Morse, a graduate of Swarthmore College, spent a number of years living in Botswana in the 1970s. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Vermont College. Her novel An Unexpected Forest, published by Down East Books, won the Independent Publisher's Gold Medalist Award for Best Regional Fiction in the Northeast U.S. and was also selected as the Winner of Best Published Fiction by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance at the 2008 Maine Literary Awards. Eleanor Morse has taught in adult education programs, in prisons, and in university systems, both in Maine and in southern Africa. She currently works as an adjunct faculty member with Spaulding University's MFA Writing program in Louisville, Kentucky. She lives on Peaks Island, Maine. She will be reading from her new book, "White Dog Fell From the Sky."
Ben Kilham
Ben Kilham is a licensed bear rehabilitator, independent wildlife biologist, and author of the best selling book, Among the Bears: Raising Orphan Cubs in the Wild. He resides in Lyme, New Hampshire with his wife Debra where he raises orphan bear cubs and studies their behavior. He story has been featured in “A Man among Bears” on the National Geographic Channel and “Papa Bear” on the Discovery Channel. He has given over 450 presentations about black bear behavior to schools and other organizations throughout New Hampshire and New England to over 50,000 people. Kilham has written articles about raising and introducing the bears back to the wild for N.H. Audubon and Tree Farmer Magazine.