It gives me great pleasure to welcome poet Karen Meadows to the Debutante Ball this week! almond, eyeless (2018, Groundhog Poetry Press) is the first book of poetry by Karen Meadows and is an SPD bestseller and recommended read. Her work has also appeared in Subtropics, Blackbird and The Hollins Critic. She was honored in March at McDaniel College as the 32nd recipient of the B. Christopher Bothe Memorial Lecture….
I’m so happy to welcome Vanessa Hua to the Debutante Ball this week! Vanessa is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the short story collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, and the national bestseller, A River of Stars, which O, The Oprah Magazine calls “a marvel” and The Economist says is “delightful.” For two decades, she has been writing, in journalism and in fiction, about Asia and the Asian diaspora. She has received a Rona Jaffe…
I’m so excited to welcome Sam Hawke to the Debutante Ball this week! Sam is a delightful human being who writes epic fantasy in Canberra, Australia, where she lives with her two dogs, two small ninjas, and her husband. Her debut novel CITY OF LIES, the first in the Poison Wars series from Tor, came out just this past July to critical acclaim and lots of excited hand wavings. It’s been…
So excited to welcome another one of my agent sisters to the blog today! Nicole Blades is the author of the novels The Thunder Beneath Us, Earth’s Waters, and Have You Met Nora? She’s also a prior Deb Ball guest author, so we’re thrilled to have her back! After you’ve read her interview below, check out her previous post, The Truth About Diversity in Publishing. Nicole Blades is a novelist, speaker, and journalist who…
I’m so, so happy to feature poet, novelist and now, non-fiction author Elizabeth Rosner on the blog this week! Elizabeth and I are literary agency AND publisher sisters – both represented by the wonderful DeFiore & Company in New York, publishing our books with the incredible Counterpoint Press located in Berkeley, CA. Elizabeth is the author of five, count-em five, books — and most recently her first non-fiction/memoir Survivor Café: The Legacy of…
I’m so thrilled to feature debut author Suzanne Baltsar on the blog this week! Suzanne and I are agent AND publisher sisters – both repped by the fabulous Sharon Pelletier and debuting with Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster. Suzanne’s long history with books can be traced back to the second grade when she learned she could earn free pizzas in exchange for book reports, thus beginning her addiction to personal pan…
CONGRATULATIONS to author Lori Rader-Day, whose book, The Day I Died, is the 2018 winner of the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original! I’m so pleased to welcome Rader-Day back to the Debutante Ball. For those of you who’ve been following us for a while, she really needs no introduction. Rader-Day was a deb back in 2014, and we have since hosted her a few times, celebrating every…
I am absolutely thrilled to be interviewing Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Enchanted and The Child Finder, for our inaugural guest spot on the 2019 Debutante Ball. I had the good fortune to be introduced to Denfeld’s work through my mother, whose book recommendations I always take seriously. With The Enchanted, she hit it out of the park, and I soon had to follow that with reading Denfeld’s latest release, The…
Our guest this week is Jennifer Klepper, the author of Unbroken Threads, a story about a former corporate attorney who volunteers to represent a young Syrian woman in her bid for asylum. I first met Jennifer IRL at a writing conference prior to either of us having published books. Since that time, I’ve interacted with her in various online writing groups, and over the course of the years, I’ve come…
Awhile back, I did an interview in which I mentioned how much I loved the book Bridget Jones by Helen Fielding. A short time later I received a package in the mail containing a copy of a historical fiction title called Dear Mrs. Bird, written by a debut British author named AJ Pearce. The publisher mentioned that despite this book being WWII-era historical fiction, the protagonist and the voice of…
