Meet the Authors & Bookfaire

The Friends of the Shannon Center Meet the Authors & Bookfaire

will be on March 23, 2013 from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Authors currently scheduled are as follows:

Keynote authors:

Sara S. "Sue" Hodson & Kelly Lange

Breakout authors:

Anne Cherian, Laurel Corona
Selden Edwards, Sharon Heath
Laura McNeal & Tom McNeal

For Registration Information and Order Form

CLICK HERE

	Opening Keynote Speaker Sara S. “Sue” Hodson is literary manuscripts curator at the Huntington Library where she has administered the Jack London Papers for over thirty years. She has lectured widely on London, co-edited Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer and recently co-authored Jack London, Photographer. She was named Woman of the Year for 2012 by the Jack London Foundation. Although London continues to be one of the most widely read American writers, few know that he was also an accomplished photographer, producing nearly 12,000 photographs during his short life (1876-1916). This book not only includes more than 200 of the images, but tells of London’s often life-threatening adventures photographing the people and places in the early 1900s from London’s East End to the San Francisco earthquake to the South Seas islanders and beyond.
	Closing Keynote Speaker Kelly Lange began her long news reporter career as one of the first two women traffic/weather reporters in this area to patrol in helicopters. She went on to be the first woman to anchor a nightly newscast at an NBC-owned station, served as Rose Parade co-host with Michael Landon, was the regular guest host of Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, a regular guest host of NBC’s Today show, and in southern California co-anchored nightly newscasts at KNBC-TV from 1971-1999, winning several Emmys in the process. She began writing mysteries while still a news anchor, partially to relieve insomnia from working on the 11 p.m. newscast. Her mystery series features Maxi Poole, who Lange says is a news reporter just like her, except younger, prettier, sexier, and smarter. She’s also written two stand-alone mysteries Trophy Wife and Gossip.
	Morning Breakout Speakers
	Anne Cherian, born and raised in India, now living in California, gives her characters in A Good Indian Wife and The Invitation similar backgrounds. In the first, Neel, a Stanford-educated doctor who would rather be white, wants to rid himself of Leila, the wife he had been manipulated into marrying. Meanwhile, Leila struggles to reconcile the tradition of arranged marriage with the choices America offers. In The Invitation, four first-generation Indian immigrants who graduated from UCLA meet at a party 25 years later. Each arrives determined to show the success they have achieved. Amidst the Bollywood music and one-upmanship, secrets are revealed, as each realizes that the success they had imagined as students has been changed by their years of living in America.
	Sharon Heath writes fiction and nonfiction exploring the interplay of science and spirit, politics and pop culture. A native Angelena, she is a Jungian analyst in private practice and a faculty member at the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. She practices yoga and devours British mysteries in a household ruled by a trio of wildly eccentric cats. Heath’s tragicomic novel, The History of My Body, is the coming-of-age story of Fleur Robins, an unusual child—autistic, a genius, or just odd?—born of an alcoholic mother and an emotionally and physically absent father. Fleur’s horror of “the void” leads her to the mind-boggling realm of quantum physics and propels her on a journey toward maturity that is both heart-wrenching and hopeful.
	Tom McNeal is a native Californian who spent his summers on the small farm in Nebraska where his mother grew up. He has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and has coauthored four young adult novels with his wife, Laura. His first novel, Goodnight, Nebraska, received the James A. Michener Memorial Prize and is a story of love, hatred, loss, and redemption in small-town America. In his second, To Be Sung Underwater, both California and Nebraska serve as settings for what the Wall Street Journal’s Cynthia Crossen called “by far the best love story I’ve read in a long time” and USA Today called one of the five best novels of 2011.
	Afternoon Breakout Speakers
	Laurel Corona received the Christopher Medal for Until our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance, and is a two-time winner of the Theodor S. Geisel Award for Book of the Year at the San Diego Book Awards, for her historical novels The Four Seasons: A Novel of Vivaldi’s Venice, and Finding Emilie, which centers on the daughter left behind after the untimely death of the brilliant mathematician and scientist in pre-revolutionary France, Emilie du Chatelet. Her novel Penelope’s Daughter is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey from the woman’s point of view. Her fourth novel, The Mapmaker’s Daughter, will be released in Fall 2013. She has also written 17 nonfiction young adult library books and is a tenured professor of humanities at San Diego City College.
	Selden Edwards, former headmaster at both Sacramento and Crane Country Day Schools, began working on a novel in 1974, and 33 years and many drafts later published The Little Book, a historical time-travel fantasy. The book begins with Edwards’ hero, born in 1941, suddenly transported to 1897 Vienna. Edwards’ new novel, The Lost Prince, focuses on another character in The Little Book, Eleanor “Weezie” Putnam, who is Burden’s grandmother in 1941 and his contemporary in 1897. The plot and the relationships are complicated, but Edward’s lyrical voice, which brings both the historical settings and the imagined characters to sparkling life make a reader’s journey pure delight.
	Laura McNeal holds a master’s degree in fiction writing from Syracuse University and is the author, with her husband, Tom, of four novels for young adults. The first three—Crooked, Zipped, and Crushed—are set in upstate New York, and garnered four major awards including the California Book Award in Juvenile Literature. Their most recent collaboration, The Decoding of Lana Morris, has an “enchanting heroine whom teens will root for as she struggles in a world made both familiar and extraordinary—a blend of the Midwest and Oz.” Laura’s solo debut novel, Dark Water, is set in Fallbrook during a wildfire and won the San Diego Book Award in Young People’s Literature in 2011.