Book & Author 2025 Event
MEET THIS YEAR'S AUTHORS
André Aciman • Roman Year • Memoir
Paulina Bren • She-Wolves • Historical Nonfiction
Fiona Davis • The Stolen Queen • Historical Fiction
Stephanie Gorton • The Icon and the Idealist • Historical Nonfiction
Shelley Noble • The Colony Club • Historical Fiction
Scott Turow • Presumed Guilty • Legal Thriller
André Aciman
André Aciman was born in Egypt and as an adolescent, he lived in exile in Rome before coming to the United States. Roman Year is a memoir from that time.
Aciman is the author of the novels Harvard Square, Call Me by Your Name, Eight White Nights, the memoir Out of Egypt, as well as the essay collections False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory and Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. He also coauthored and edited The Proust Project and Letters of Transit. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, Granta, and the Paris Review, as well as in several volumes of The Best American Essays. He has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
Aciman teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and serves as director of the Writers’ Institute at the Graduate Center and the Center for the Humanities. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.
Roman Year
NEWS, REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS
“Aciman is a sensitive and passionate writer, and this volume’s packed with human incident: friendships, meals, sex, politics and culture, music, film, art . . . A brave, sensuous, tender chronicle.”
—Joan Frank, The Boston Globe
—Ingrid D. Rowland, The American Scholar
Paulina Bren
Paulina Bren is an award-winning historian. She teaches at Vassar College as Pittsburgh Endowment Chair in the Humanities, where she also directs the Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies Program. Her previous book, the bestselling The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and has been widely translated. Her new book, She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street, has been called “enthralling” by Publisher’s Weekly, was named in The Washington Post’s, Town & Country’s and Lit Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books for Fall 2024,” a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read, and Untapped New York’s 100 Best Books about New York of all time. She-Wolves is in development with Mark Gordon Pictures.
Born in the former Czechoslovakia, Paulina grew up in the U.K. and the U.S., receiving her B.A. from Wesleyan University, her M.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle, and her PhD from New York University. Before switching to narrative non-fiction, she was a well-known scholar of everyday life and communism behind the Iron Curtain, starting with her groundbreaking book, The Greengrocer and His TV, followed by the collected volume of essays, Communism Unwrapped.
She-Wolves
NEWS, REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS
Coming Soon!
Fiona Davis
Fiona Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of eight historical fiction novels set in iconic New York City buildings, including The Spectacular, The Magnolia Palace, The Address, and The Lions of Fifth Avenue, which was a Good Morning America book club pick. Her articles have appeared in publications like The Wall Street Journal and Oprah magazine.
Fiona was born in Canada and first came to New York as an actress, but fell in love with writing after getting a master's degree at Columbia Journalism School. As a journalist she wrote extensively about health, fitness, dance and theater. She began her current career as a novelist thrilled to integrate her experience, observations and imagination. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages and she is currently based in New York City.
Her latest novel, Stolen Queen, will transport you from New York City’s most glamorous party, the Met Gala, to the labyrinth streets of Cairo and the mysterious Valley of the Kings and back in search for a missing antiquity.
The Stolen Queen will be published January 7, 2025
Instagram Reel About the Met Gala (1:25)
Instagram Reel About the Met exhibits researched for the book (1:05)
Stephanie Gorton
Stephanie Gorton wrote Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America (2020); she also was a finalist for the Sperber Prize for journalism biography. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Paris Review Daily, among other publications, and she has appeared on radio shows including On Point and History This Week.
Stephanie attended the University of Edinburgh and, after a decade working in publishing in the UK and New York, Goucher College's Nonfiction MFA program. Her second book, The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America, is among The New Republic’s “Best Books of the Fall.”
Stephanie writes nonfiction because she loves the sense of pursuit and discovery she gets in the archives as she reconstructs personalities, relationships, and the vanished world of the past. Her mother trained as an archeologist; she thinks a childhood spent visiting archeological sites and museums had a lasting effect on her – she is always curious about the backstory, about what shaped today's world.
Lebanese-American by birth, Gorton lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
The Icon & the Idealist
NEWS, REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS
Coming Soon!
Shelley Noble
Shelley Noble is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Whisper Beach, Beach Colors, and The Tiffany Girls. Her newest novel is The Colony Club, a thrilling historical novel of a club which was the first women’s association of its kind.
A former professor, professional dancer and choreographer, she now lives in New Jersey halfway between the shore, where she loves visiting lighthouses and vintage carousels, and New York City, where she delights in the architecture, the theatre, and ferreting out the old stories behind the new.
Shelley is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and Historical Novel Society.
The Colony Club
NEWS, REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS
"This is the ultimate female empowerment story. Shelley Noble has unearthed a delicious sliver of history that will delight her readers. Fashioned after the exclusive men’s clubs of the day, The Colony Club explores the formation of the first women’s social club in Manhattan during the Gilded Age. Despite commissioning the project to the celebrated architect, Stanford White (later involved in the Murder of the Century), it’s the women who triumph and make this dream a reality. Noble’s cast of iron-willed heroines take up the charge with astounding passion and determination that shines on every page."
— Renee Rosen, USA Today Bestselling Author of Fifth Avenue Glamour Girl
"The Colony Club is an inspiring, powerful tribute to the Gilded Age women who broke through barriers to create their own place in the world. This impeccably researched story features real events and people in history, spotlighting the amazing feats women can accomplish when they support each other."
— Madeline Martin, New York Times bestselling author of The Keeper of Hidden Books
Scott Turow
Scott Turow was born in Chicago. After graduating with high honors from Amherst College, he was a Fellow and taught Creative Writing at Stanford. He graduated with honors from Harvard Law School and while there he published his first book, One L, about first year law school. Then as an Assistant US Attorney in Chicago, Scott was lead counsel in a number of prosecutions related to corruption in the Illinois judiciary.
He is the author of fourteen best-selling works of fiction, including his first novel Presumed Innocent, which was made into a movie and recently a television series streaming on Apple TV+. Scott frequently contributes essays and op-ed pieces to publications including The New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Playboy and The Atlantic. Scott's books have won a number of literary awards, been translated into more than 40 languages, and sold more than 30 million copies.
Scott is a retired partner from the Chicago office of the international firm, Dentons, where he concentrated on white-collar criminal defense and pro bono matters. Scott has been active in a number of charitable organizations promoting literacy, education and legal rights. He has three adult children and eight grandchildren. He resides in Florida, but continues to spend summers around Chicago. His latest thriller is Presumed Guilty, about whether true justice can ever be available for those presumed guilty.
Presumed Guilty will be published January 14, 2025
Amy Silverman, Moderator
Amy Silverman is a journalist, author and teacher based in her hometown of Phoenix.
Over the last 30 years, she has covered everything from juvenile justice to the history of the Valley's food scene to the John McCain only Arizonans knew.
Her work has appeared on KJZZ, as well as radio shows and in The Forward, Literary Hub, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and more. Previously, Amy worked for 25 years as a staff writer and managing editor at New Times, the alternative weekly in Phoenix.
Along with Phoenix, Amy's work has focused on issues related to disability, often weaving narrative with investigative reporting to tell stories about her daughter, Sophie, who has Down syndrome, and others with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).
In 2020, Amy worked with the Arizona Daily Star and Pro Publica's Local Reporting Network on "State of Denial," a yearlong project focused on services for Arizonans with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Amy is a three-time winner of the Arizona Press Club’s Journalist of the Year award, most recently for “State of Denial.” The series won first place for public service from the Arizona Press Club, along with other awards.
Her first book, My Heart Can't Even Believe It: A Story of Science, Love, and Down Syndrome, was published in 2016. A graduate of Scripps College (B.A. American Studies) and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (M.S.), she lives in Tempe with her husband, Ray Stern, a reporter for the Arizona Republic. They have two daughters.