Open Book Fall 2019 Program

OPEN BOOK EVENT DECEMBER 4, 2019

#PRHOpenBook @PRHLibrary

OPEN BOOK EVENT

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

11:00AM – 12:00PM....................................AUTHOR PANEL 12:00PM – 12:30PM....................................................LUNCH 12:30PM – 2:00PM..............STAFF PICKS PRESENTATION 2:00PM – 3:00PM.......................................AUTHOR PANEL 3:00PM - 3:15PM......................................HOLIDAY TOAST

AUTHORS Afia Atakora was born in the United Kingdom and raised in New Jersey, where she now lives. She graduated from New York University and has an MFA from Columbia University, where she was the recipient of the De Alba Fellowship. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and she was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers.

Esther Safran Foer was the CEO of Sixth & I, a center for arts, ideas, and religion. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Bert. They are the parents of Franklin, Jonathan, and Joshua, and the grandparents of six.

Janice Kaplan has enjoyed wide success as a magazine editor, television producer, writer, and journalist. The former Editor-in-Chief of Parade magazine, she is the author or coauthor of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Gratitude Diaries and I'll See You Again. She lives in New York City and Kent, Connecticut.

AUTHORS Robert Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls, named one of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books and one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2013. As a journalist, his work has appeared in New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Men's Journal. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Heather Dune Macadam is the acclaimed author of 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Jewish Transport to Auschwitz and Rena’s Promise: A Story of Sisters in Auschwitz. A board member of the Cities of Peace: Auschwitz and the director and president of the Rena’s Promise Foundation, her work in the battle against Holocaust denial have been recognized by Yad Vashem in the UK and Israel, the USC Shoah Foundation, the National Museum of Jewish History in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the Panstowe Museum of Auschwitz in Oswiecim, Poland. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, on PBS, and other major media outlets. She divides her time between New York and Herefordshire, England.

Francesca Momplaisir is a Haitian-born multilingual literature scholar and writer of fiction and poetry in both English and her native Haitian Kreyol. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. She earned a Doctorate in African and African diaspora literature as an NYU MacCracken fellow under her supervisor and mentor, Ngugi wa Thiong'o. She is a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to travel to Ghana to research the cultural retention and memory of the transatlantic slave trade. She lives in the New York City metro area.

AUTHORS Emily Neuberger is an MFA graduate and grant recipient at Brooklyn College's fiction program, and previously worked as an editorial assistant at Viking Books. She has a music degree from NYU, where she studied musical theater and writing. A performer for fifteen years, she performed at Carnegie Hall in Stephen Schwartz's birthday celebration and sang for Stephen Sondheim at the Music Institute of Chicago. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. A Tender Thing is her debut novel.

Allison Pataki is the New York Times bestselling author of The Traitor’s Wife, The Accidental Empress, Sisi: Empress On Her Own, Where the Light Falls, as well as the nonfiction memoir Beauty in the Broken Places and two children’s books, Nelly Takes New York and Poppy Takes Paris. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. A former news writer and producer, Pataki has written for The New York Times, ABC News, HuffPost, USA Today, Fox News, and other outlets. She has appeared on Today, Fox & Friends, Good Day New York, Good Day Chicago, and MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Pataki graduated cum laude from Yale University with a major in English and spent several years in journalism before switching to fiction writing.

A member of the Historical Novel Society, she lives in New York with her husband and family.

Emma Straub is from New York City. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Vacationers and Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures.

Her fiction and nonfiction have been published

by Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, Time, Slate, and The New York Times, and she is a staff writer for Rookie. Straub lives with her husband in Brooklyn, where she also works as a bookseller.