Diana Luca

DENNIS LEHANE is the author of eight novels, including The Given Day, Shutter Island, Mystic River, and Gone, Baby, Gone. Three of his novels have been adapted into major motion pictures, including Mystic River, which won two Academy Awards. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, Lehane splits his time between the Boston area and West Central Florida.

ITABARI NJERI, winner of an American Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is author of the memoirs Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone and The Last Plantation. A former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Public Radio station WBUR-FM, she attended graduate school at Harvard and holds degrees from Columbia University and Boston University. She currently teaches in Atlanta and is working on her debut novel. “The Collar” is her first published fiction.

Trudy O’Nan

STEWART O’NAN’S story collection In the Walled City received the 1993 Drue Heinz Prize. His many novels include Snow Angels, The Speed Queen, A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster, and Songs for the Missing. With Stephen King, he coauthored Faithful, a nonfiction account of the 2004 Red Sox season, and had the pleasure of hanging out around the Fens again, where he used to clean weekly apartments.

Prudence Carter

PATRICIA POWELL was born in Jamaica and emigrated to Boston with her family in 1982. She is the author of Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones, The Pagoda, and The Fullness of Everything. Powell currently lives in California, after spending twenty-five years in Boston. She is a professor of creative writing at Mills College.

Dennis Lehane

Dennis Lehane is the author of The New York Times bestseller Mystic River (also an Academy Award-winning major motion picture); Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone (also a major motion picture); Sacred; Darkness, Take My Hand; A Drink Before the War, which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel; and, most recently, The Given Day. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, he splits his time between the Boston area and Florida.