Lillian Nayder

Lillian Nayder is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College and President of the Dickens Society.  She has published critical studies of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins and is writing a novel about Dickens’s two sisters, Fanny and Letitia, and his blind sister-in-law Harriet.  Her biography of Catherine Dickens, The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth, is her first venture into life writing.  She lives with her family in New Gloucester, Maine.

Holly Chamberlin

Holly Chamberlin lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband Stephen, an architect and photographer, and their fabulous cats Cyrus and Betty. When not writing, Holly enjoys reading, hosting friends and family at their restored Victorian home, going out to hear friends play jazz and blues, working on scrapbooks, and making beaded jewelry.

Liza Bakewell

Liza Bakewell is an anthropologist, a faculty member at Brown University and the author of MADRE: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun.

While Liza was an anthropology PhD student, her research took her to Mexico, where she became intrigued by the numerous Mexican expressions that use the word “madre” (mother in Spanish). Her book, part memoir, part anthropological investigation into the culture and language of Mexico, was funded in part by the Fulbright Fellowship that she received in 2008.
 
Liza graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a B.A. in performing arts and anthropology and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Brown University. She has been on the faculty at Brown since 1992, first as teaching faculty, and now as research faculty. She also directs The Mesolore Project (www.mesolore.net), a research and educational software project on Mesoamerican writing systems, manuscripts, and history, from both the pre- and post-Cortés periods. In addition, she has taught courses at Bowdoin College and Colgate University

Liza has lived in Connecticut, Ohio, Colorado, California, Mexico, and Rhode Island. For the past ten years she has lived on the coast of Maine with her twin daughters.

James L. Nelson

Jim Nelson was born and raised in Lewiston, Maine. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in motion picture/television production but, finding that despite the California sun, it was a damp, drizzly November in his soul, Jim took the cure Melville recommended and decided to sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. For six years he worked on board traditional sailing ships before realizing it would be easier to write about sailing rather than actually doing it.

Jim is the author of sixteen works of maritime fiction and history. His novel Glory in the Name was the winner or the American Library Association/William Young Boyd Award for Best Military Fiction and his nonfiction George Washington's Secret Navy won the Naval Order’s Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval History. He has appeared on the Discovery Channel, History Channel and BookTV. He currently lives in Harpswell with his former shipmate, now wife Lisa and their four children.

Author Announcement: Sarah Braunstein

Sarah Braunstein is the author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (W.W. Norton & Co., Feb. 2011). She was recently named one the “5 Under 35” fiction writers by the National Book Foundation, and was a 2007 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She teaches at Harvard University Extension School and the Stanford Online Writer’s Studio. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MSW from Smith College School for Social Work. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Author Announcement: Maria Padian

Maria Padian is a freelance writer, essayist, and author of young adult novels.  Her debut novel, Brett McCarthy: Work in Progress, was selected as an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults in 2009 and also received a Maine Literary Award and a Maine Lupine Honor Award.  Her second novel, Jersey Tomatoes Are the Best, was published by Knopf Books for Young Readers in March, 2011.

A graduate of Middlebury College and the University of Virginia, Maria has also attended Oxford University and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.  Born in New York but raised in New Jersey, she currently lives in Maine with her family and their Australian shepherd.  To learn more about her, visit www.mariapadian.com

Author Announcement: Caitlin Shetterly

Caitlin Shetterly is a freelance writer, frequent contributor to National Public Radio, actor and the Founder and Artistic Director of the Winter Harbor Theatre Company

Her memoir, MADE FOR YOU AND ME: GOING WEST, GOING BROKE, FINDING HOME, was released in March.