'So What?' Richard Russo on Getting a Memoir Published
Association of Writers and Writing Programs - Hynes Convention Center
(Leah Hager Cohen (moderator), Amy Bloom, Richard Russo) Amy Bloom is author of the New York Times best-selling Away: A Novel, and Where the God of Love Hangs Out, a collection of short fiction. Richard Russo is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls, Straight Man, and Nobody's Fool. The reading will begin with an introduction by poet Steven Cramer, director of the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, and will be followed by a discussion moderated by novelist and critic Leah Hager Cohen, author of The Grief of Others and House Lights.

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels and three collections of short stories including Love Invents Us, and the New York Times bestselling novel Away. Her short fiction includes Where the God Of Love Hangs Out, also a New York Times bestseller; Come to Me, a National Book Award finalist; and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first nonfiction book was Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitudes, now a staple of university sociology and biology courses. Her work has been translated into 15 languages.

Richard Russo knows small town America. This masterful novelist has an uncanny sense of the way life works in the gritty industrial towns of the American Northeast. From the gossip and the resentments, to the people and the cafes, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Russo chronicles blue-collar America in ways constantly surprising and utterly revealing. Russo's previous works include seven novels and one collection of short stories. His 2001 novel, Empire Falls, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His newest book, That Old Cape Magic, came out in 2009. Russo earned a bachelor's degree, a master's in fine arts, and a PhD from the University of Arizona. He has two daughters and lives with his wife in Camden, Maine.