Past Featured Guests
1. Julia Glass
Julia Glass's latest novel,
And the Dark Sacred Night, will be published in April 2014. Her previous novels are
Three Junes, winner of the 2002 National Book Award in Fiction; The Whole World Over; and
The Widower's Tale. Her third book, I See You Everywhere, a collection of linked stories, won the 2009 SUNY John Gardner Fiction Award. She has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Other awards for her fiction include the Sense of Place Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, and the Pirate's Alley Medal for Best Novella. Her essays have been widely anthologized, most recently in
Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book, edited by Sean Manning. Julia lives with her two sons and their father in Massachusetts.
2. Barney Karpfinger
Barney Karpfinger founded the Karpfinger Agency in 1985. The agency's fiction list ranges from some of today's best mysteries to fine literary fiction. The non-fiction list includes narrative non-fiction, as well as memoirs, biographies and cultural and political analysis. Before establishing the agency, Karpfinger ran the contracts department of a major New York publishing house. Karpfinger studied English at Columbia University while supporting himself by working as a paralegal.
3. Sandy Keenan
Variety is the common thread in Sandy Keenan's resume - which is a mix of editing and reporting jobs in a range of subjects and story forms - for newspapers, magazines and Web sites. In nearly seven years at the New York Times, she has held three jobs, serving as environment editor overseeing the "Green" blog and seven staff writers, the deputy sports editor responsible for Olympic coverage in Beijing and Vancouver, and more recently, as a staff writer for the "Home" section writing about people living interesting, sustainable or well-designed lives.
Prior to the Times, Sandy spent nearly two decades at Newsday in, again, a wide range of managerial and reporting positions - starting as a major league baseball and basketball writer and eventually becoming the assistant managing editor for investigations and enterprise.
Projects Sandy has edited have won national sports, health care, real estate, environmental and narrative journalism awards. Earlier in her career, Sandy was a sports and feature writer at the Miami Herald and spent three years as a writer/reporter for Sports Illustrated. She was a scholarship tennis player at Northwestern University, where she earned a bachelor's degree at the Medill School of Journalism. She and her husband, Michael Winerip, live in Lido Beach, NY, where they are trying to get four grown children out of the house.
4. Eric Marcus
Eric Marcus is the author of
Why Suicide? Questions & Answers About Suicide, Suicide Prevention, and
Coping with the Suicide of Someone You Know. In addition to Why Suicide?, Eric is the author of several other books, including Is It A Choice?, Making Gay History, and What If Someone I Know Is Gay? He is also co-author of
Breaking the Surface, the #1 NY Times best-selling autobiography of Olympic diving champion Greg Louganis. In addition, Eric has written articles and columns for the
NY Times, NY Daily News, NY Post, Newsweek, and the NJ Star-Ledger.
Eric is a former associate producer for both "Good Morning America" and CBS Morning News. He is a graduate of Vassar College and earned his master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. For more information, please visit www.ericmarcus.com and www.whysuicidebook.com.
5. Steven Petrow
Steven Petrow is a columnist for
The New York Times ("Civil Behavior") and Parade magazine and is currently working on a memoir (Function In Disaster; Finish In Style). For more than two decades he has covered the AIDS epidemic and has published four related books:
Dancing Against the Darkness: The Story of People with AIDS, Their Friends, Families and Communities (Lexington; 1990);
When Someone You Know Has AIDS (Crown; 1993); Ending the HIV Epidemic (ETR Network; 1990); and
The HIV Drug Book (Pocket Books; 1995). In all, he is the author/editor of more than a dozen books including
Steven Petrow's Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners (Workman, 2011), The Essential Book of Gay Manners and Etiquette (HarperCollins; 1995), and, The Lost Hamptons (Arcadia; 2004). Mr. Petrow has published work, including personal essays, in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Salon.com, The Advocate, Life Magazine, and many other outlets. He is the former president of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association.
6. Toni Sciarra Poynter
Toni Sciarra Poynter is an independent editor and published author with more than 30 years' experience in nonfiction book publishing. As an acquisition editor at HarperCollins, William Morrow, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan, she worked with prominent professionals, including bestselling trainer Jack Canfield, Families and Work Institute president Ellen Galinsky, infant/child researcher Alison Gopnik, Ph.D., neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D., and New York Times science writers Gina Kolata and Sandra Blakeslee.
She is the author or coauthor of five books and has independently edited or coauthored books under contract to HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, the Penguin Group, Rodale, and Workman. She collaborated with MacArthur "Genius" fellow and Freelancers Union founder Sara Horowitz on The Freelancer's Bible (Workman, 2012), praised in The Atlantic as "important and useful."
With behavioral expert Joe Navarro, she coauthored Louder Than Words (HarperBusiness), translated into 17 languages and selected as one of "Six Best Business Books to Read for Your Career in 2010" (Wall Street Journal Digital Network's fins.com).
Her solo book From This Day Forward: Meditations on the First Years of Marriage (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) sold 125,000+ copies in multiple editions. She has appeared on TV and radio and at numerous writers' conferences, is co-president of Women's Media Group, and serves on the Books for a Better Life Awards Executive Committee. For more information, please see http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/ToniSciarra/
7. Donald Poynter
As a veteran in the field of animation for more than 30 years, Donald Poynter's professional experience has encompassed feature films, network and cable television, and independent films including clients such as Paramount, MTV, Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon, and Scholastic. After working in all phases of animation production, he gravitated to production design and storyboards.
He received his BFA in drawing from the University of Cincinnati and MFA in Computer Art from The School of Visual Arts (SVA).
As an instructor in the SVA Film and Animation undergraduate and continuing education programs, Donald has developed many classes for the curriculum and serves as a thesis advisor and member of the Animation Thesis Committee.
8. Natalie Standiford
Natalie Standiford is the author of many books for children and young adults, including How to Say Goodbye in Robot, Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters, and The Secret Tree, all published by Scholastic Press. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in Russian Language and Literature, which she is finally putting to good use in her next YA novel, set in Leningrad in 1982. She was born and raised in Baltimore and now lives in New York City, where began her career as an editorial assistant at Random House Books for Young Readers. She plays bass in an all-YA-author rock band called Tiger Beat, and can be found on the web at www.nataliestandiford.com.
9. Michael Winerip
Mike Winerip, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, has been with the New York Times for three decades, holding a wide variety of positions, including magazine staff writer; the education, parenting and suburban columnists; national political correspondent; investigative reporter and deputy metro editor. In 2000, his expose on the mental health system in the New York Times Magazine, "Bedlam in the Streets," was a finalist for the Pulitzer and resulted in the state of New York appropriating $215 million for community care. The next year he led a team of reporters that won the Pulitzer for the series, "How Race Is Lived in America." His nonfiction book on the community mental health system, 9 Highland Road, published in 1995, was a finalist for the Penn Nonfiction award. But by far, the most fun he has had writing, was doing the Adam Canfield books, a series of middle school novels on the world's greatest student newspaper. He has spent the last year developing a blog aimed at baby boomers for the Times.
10. Marian Young/The Young Agency
A graduate of Swarthmore College, Marian Young has been working in publishing her entire career. Her first job, with a publishers' advertising agency, led to a position with Harper & Row (now HarperCollins) as advertising director. Preferring to work directly with writers, she decided to become an agent and worked at two literary agencies before going out on her own in 1986.
Over the years, she has had the privilege of working with a diverse group of writers in many fields: art, history, fiction, cookbooks, and general non-fiction. She represents Bret Lott, author of one of the highest-selling Oprah's Book Club picks, JEWEL; the PEN/Bingham Award-winner WE'RE IN TROUBLE, by Christopher Coake; historian Maury Klein; and the mystery/thriller writers Carolyn Haines, Thomas Lakeman, and newcomer Jeannie Holmes. Two of her cookbooks, ALL ABOUT BRAISING, by Molly Stevens, and TASTY, by Roy Finamore, were awarded the prestigious Beard Award, and another cookbook, FISH WITHOUT A DOUBT, by Rick Moonen and Roy Finamore, was chosen as the first book in the Gourmet Magazine Cookbook Club.
If there is a theme to her preferences, it would follow the words of Oscar Wilde: "My tastes are simple. I am always satisfied with the best."