Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 2
Three amazing literary writers with deep ties to Waterville, who also happen to have shared many meals together and written pieces for Breaking Bread: Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Life, will close out our final day of events in Waterville. Come hear Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo (Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic), artist and writer Kate Russo (Super Host), and bestselling author and transgender activist Jennifer Finney Boylan (Good Boy: My Live in 7 Dogs and Mad Honey) share words, laughs, and insights about food, friends, family, and what it takes to build a writing life.
This event is free.
Books will be sold by Devaney, Doak & Garrett.
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 is the author of eight novels, including Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of short stories; and a memoir, Elsewhere. His 2001 novel, Empire Falls, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was also adapted into an HBO miniseries, starring Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Helen Hunt. Russo’s latest work is Chances Are…, a humorous and riveting story about the complex power of friendship.
Russo earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s in fine arts, and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. In 2016 he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association and in 2017 he received France’s Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He has two daughters and lives with his wife in Portland, Maine.
Kate Russo grew up in Maine but now divides her time between there and the United Kingdom. She has an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, and exhibits in both the UK and the US. Tom Perrotta calls Russo’s debut novel Super Host, "A charming, compulsively readable, romantically suspenseful novel about...the courage it takes to start over."
Professor Jennifer Finney-Boylan, author of eighteen books, is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University. She serves on the Board of Trustees of PEN America, the nonprofit advocating for authors, readers, and freedom of expression. From 2011 to 2018 she served on the Board of Directors of GLAAD; she was co-chair of GLAAD’s board of directors from 2013-17.
Her most recent book is the memoir Good Boy: My Life in 7 Dogs, published by Celadon/Macmillan in April of 2020. Her next book project is the novel Mad Honey, co-authored with Jodi Picoult, slate for publication in autumn of 2022 by Ballantine/Random House.
Her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There: a Life in Two Genders (Broadway/Doubleday/Random House) was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. A novelist, memoirist, and short story writer, she is also a nationally known advocate for human rights. Jenny has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show on four occasions; Live with Larry King twice; the Today Show, the Barbara Walters Special, NPR’s Marketplace and Talk of the Nation; she has also been the subject of documentaries on CBS News’ 48 Hours and The History Channel. She served as an advisor to the television series Transparent.
She lives in New York City, and in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, with her wife, Deedie. They have a son, Sean and a daughter, Zai.