MAINE LIT FEST EVENT - DAY 9
Legendary Maine novelist and Pulitzer Prize Winner Richard Russo (Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic) will speak with promising debut authors whose new books have been recently released or are on the horizon. Gillian Burnes (Soft Features), Marpheen Chann (Moon in Full: A Coming of Age and Coming Out Story), and W.S. Winslow (The Northern Reach) will participate.
This event is free.
Books will be sold by Print: A Bookstore.
Gillian Burnes’s stories have appeared in Glimmer Train and The Dillydoun Review, and her non-fiction work in Outside, OnEarth, Wilderness, and other magazines. She lives with her husband and daughter on the edge of her in-laws’ organic cattle farm in central Maine. Soft Features is her first novel.
Marpheen Chann is a thinker, writer, advocate, and speaker on social justice, equity, and inclusion.
As a gay, first-generation Asian American born in California to a Cambodian refugee family and later adopted by an evangelical, white working-class family in Maine, Marpheen uses a mix of humor and storytelling to help people view topics such as racism, xenophobia, and homophobia through an intersectional lens.
Marpheen is the author of a memoir titled “Moon in Full” coming out June 2022 from Islandport Press.
Marpheen Chann has a strong commitment to public service and serves as:
At-Large Charter Commissioner, City of Portland, Maine (Elected)
President, Cambodian Community Association of Maine
Member, Maine Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
Member, Planning Board for the City of Portland, Maine
Board Member, Equality Community Center in Portland, Maine
Marpheen Chann lives in Portland, Maine. He works in the nonprofit and advocacy sector and holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Southern Maine and a law degree from the University of Maine School of Law.
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.
W. S. Winslow was born and raised in Maine but spent her working life in Boston, New York and San Francisco. A ninth-generation Mainer, she now lives in a small town Downeast most of the year. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French from the University of Maine and an MFA from NYU. Her work has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Lit, Yemassee Journal and Bird’s Thumb. Her first novel, The Northern Reach, was published by Flatiron Books in 2021. She is currently working on a second novel and a short story collection.