Helen Sedgwick

When I was several years into my career as a physicist, I started taking evening classes. I was frustrated with my life and I knew that I was searching for something but I had no idea what it was, so I tried the lot: life drawing, Thai cookery, Indian dancing, French lessons… and finally, creative […]

Sara Benincasa

I began writing as a child because I loved books and I wanted to imitate what I saw there. My mother was the first in her Italian-American family to go to college. The daughter of a single mother, she had long dreamed of being a schoolteacher. When I was born, she had recently received her […]

Reed Farrel Coleman

While my success has come as a mystery writer, I began as a poet. Poetry was my way to be heard above the din. I grew up in an angry household. My family communicated everything, even love, through anger and we all did it rather loudly. I recognized early on that as the youngest, my […]

Melinda Leigh

I came to writing late. A classic late-bloomer, I started out in banking, hated it with a soul-deep passion, and was happy to stay at home with my kids while they were small. But once they were in school all day, I needed something to keep me sane. My husband suggested I write a book, […]

The Role of the Fiction Writer in Our Current Presidential Election

The true test of talent for a fiction writer is the ability to imagine pain, angst, despair, discouragement, frustration as well as joy, ecstasy, elation and pleasure. This is the power that runs the machine of character creation that lies at the very heart of storytelling. As we fiction practitioners understand, craft can be learned, […]

Erika L. Sánchez

I came to poetry with a deep desperation to be acknowledged, to find alternate realities, to exist in a space that belonged only to me. Books, poems, and words offered me the respite I couldn’t find in the physical world. When I read a book, I completely disappeared into that reality. I was not a […]

Top Halloween Reads from Warren Adler