Acclaimed author Sue Miller will be hosted by Sara Divello as she returns to South End Writes on Tuesday, November 10 at 7:00 PM to read from her widely praised new work of fiction, Monogamy. In a laudatory reprise of the novel, NPR’s Maureen Corrigan described Miller as “one of our most emotionally profound and nuanced writers.” Miller will be introduced by her colleague, Lilly King, whose recent novel, Writers and Lovers, is on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2011, King was at the South End library to present an earlier novel, Father of the Rain.

Miller has a long and distinguished history with FOSEL’s South End Writes program, both as an author who presented several of her remarkable novels, The Lake Shore Limited in 2010 and The Arsonist just a few years ago, but also as someone who generously invited many of her literary colleagues to talk about their literary works at the South End library. Jack Beattie, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice Hoffman, Edith Pearlman, Doug Bauer, Anita Shreve and many other of Miller’s literary friends and associates made their way to the tiny South End branch where they were warmly welcomed by enthusiastic Southenders, delighted to meet such luminaries right here in their ‘hood.’. The novelist, who lived in the South End for many years, currently resides in Cambridge.

Monogamy, also prominently featured in a recent New York Times Sunday Book Review, is a “rich, complex book,” according to bestselling author Richard Russo, “an old-fashioned slow burn of a novel that allows readers to dream deeply.” It describes a Cambridge couple, photographer Annie and bookseller Graham, whose thirty-some year marriage has long been the envy of their friends and acquaintances. When Graham suddenly dies, Annie discovers that shortly before his death Graham had an impulsive, brief affair he was trying to end. She spirals into darkness wondering if she truly knew the man who loved her. Monogamy delves into the secrets families keep from one another, a mesmerizing work of fiction in which Miller reflects on the transformative power of memory, and the triumph of love over death itself. “A thoughtful and realistic portrait of those golden people who seem to have such enviable lives,” said Kirkus Review.

The author’s has ten previous novels that have been widely translated and published in 22 countries around the world. The Good Mother (1986) was more than six months at the top of the New York Times charts. Subsequent novels include three Book-of- the-Month main selections: Family Pictures (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award), While I Was Gone (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), and The Senator’s Wife. Her last one was The Arsonist. Her non-fiction book, The Story of My Father, was described as a “beautiful, spare memoir about her relationship with her father during his illness and death from Alzheimer’s disease.”

Miller was recently awarded a 2020 spot in the Writers-in-Residence program at The Mount, the Berkshire estate of author, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize. Her previous honors include Guggenheim and Radcliffe Institute fellowships. She was on the board of PEN’s American Center and chair of PEN New England, an active branch that worked with writing programs in local high schools and ran classes in prisons. She has taught fiction at, among other places, Amherst, Tufts, Boston University, Smith, and MIT. She currently lives in Cambridge.

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South End resident, Dorothy Keeney, will talk with FOSEL’s Yvette Jarreau at South End Writes via ZOOM on Tuesday, October 6 at 7:00 PM, about the history of Boston public school nurses, The Untold Story of Annie McKay and the Boston Public School Nurses, 1905-1988 (details below). Herself a retired public-school nurse, Keeney spent many years researching the subject, and wrote about it for, among other outlets, the Boston Union Teacher; the South End Historical Society Newsletter; and professional nurses’ publications. Keeney became the unofficial historian for the Boston School Nurses and was the former historian for the Massachusetts School Nurse Organization.

The subject of Keeney’s book, Annie McKay, was appointed by the Boston School Committee in 1905 as the first public-school nurse in Boston and Massachusetts. She taught basic hygiene in, among other places, several South End schools, including the Quincy, Way Street and Andrews schools. After her first eight weeks on the job, McKay recorded 215 cases, made 576 home visits and helped more than 70 children obtain glasses. The experiment was considered such a success that the Boston School Committee hired 25 more nurses for Boston’s elementary schools and, within a short time, the state mandated school nurses throughout Massachusetts.

McKay was born in 1867 in Ontario, Canada, and began her career as a school teacher but switched to nursing. She attended, among other places, the Massachusetts Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary. She lived in Boston and worked with the Red Cross in Europe during WW I. For a while she lived at 1525 Washington Street in the South End, where a plaque commemorates her legacy. She died in Ontario in 1944.

Keeney, a longtime Massachusetts resident who received a masters degree in Health Care Administrationj from Framington State University, described the nurses’ struggle for pay equity and a five-day work week, and their transformation to professional status from the stereotypical profile of a doctor’s handmaiden. Today, she says, school nurses are the clinical health experts in the school, the health care providers for students and staff during the school day, and advocates for preventive care and health maintenance. 

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Lauren Francis-Sharma, a child of Trinidadian immigrants, continues to explore the story of her Caribbean ancestors’ history in her new novel, Book of the Little Axe. She will be hosted on South End Writes via ZOOM on Tuesday, September 22, at 7:00 PM (details at the bottom of the page).

Her new work of fiction was preceded by the 2014 ‘Til the Well Runs Dry, a first novel that was short-listed for the William Saroyan International Prize. It won the Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was also chosen as an O, The Oprah Magazine Summer Reading Pick and lauded by the New York Times, USA Today, Essence Magazine, and People Magazine among other publications. Inspired by her grandmother’s journey from Trinidad to the United States, Francis-Sharma’s debut novel was the subject of feature articles about her Caribbean ancestry in the Washington Post  and the Baltimore Sun in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

The author’s short story, Demented, is featured in the anthology Us Against Alzheimer’s: Stories of Family Love and Faith, edited by Marita Golden. Before becoming a novelist, Francis-Sharma worked as a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney; currently, she is the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working space dedicated to both published and aspiring writers. She is also the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College and a MacDowell Fellow.

Lauren lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. with her husband and two children and “is always working on another book.”

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Award-winning foreign policy journalist, Stephen Kinzer, will return to the virtual version of South End Writes on Tuesday, September 15 at 7:00 PM via ZOOM with a talk titled: How Our Presidential Election Could Reshape the World. Kinzer will be introduced by Christopher Lydon, the erudite host of the WBUR radio show, Open Source.

A Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs at Brown University’s Watson Institute, he is the author of a dozen books about foreign affairs. They include All the Shah’s Men (reportedly a go-to book for former Senator and Secretary of State, John Kerry) and The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and their Secret World War.

Kinzer most recently presented, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, at the South End library in October 2019. He told the audience that although he had seen a lot in his life and career, in researching the book he was “shocked by what he found.” Kinzer is an Opinion Columnist at The Boston Globe and has been a South End resident since the 1970s, except for when he was New York Times bureau chief in Nicaragua, Istanbul and Berlin. At the moment, Kinzer told FOSEL, he is doing something different from writing books: He’s reading them.

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Novelist Heidi Pitlor, for many years the series editor of The Best American Short Stories, will be on South End Writes via ZOOM, Tuesday, September 8, at 7:00 PM to talk about her newest work of fiction, Impersonation. “A smart behind-the-scenes tour of the murky world of publishing, politics, and the good people who get caught in the cross-fire,” says novelist Chris Castellani (Leading Men). “Pitlor’s voice is witty and brisk, bringing warmth and light to questions of identity, independence and, yes, intellectual property. Who owns your stories? How much are they worth?” declares the New York Times Book Review.

The author of two earlier novels, The Birthdays, a Boston Globe bestseller, and The Daylight Marriage, a crime thriller centered on a failed marriage, which was optioned for the movies. Pitlor is also the editorial director of the literary studio, Plympton. Her other writings have been published in Ploughshares, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Huffington Post, and the story collections It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art, Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers. Heidi Pitlor lives outside Boston. 

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The bi-racial writing team of Alli Frank and Asha Youmans will join South End Writes on Tuesday, August 25 with their debut novel, Tiny Imperfections. Set in the  minefield of Kindergarten admissions in the San Francisco Bay Area, the writing team, former educators themselves, takes a withering look at it all through the eyes of three generations of Black women, themselves navigating the private-school shoals. Kirkus Review described it as a ‘fun, snappy read.’

Josie Bordelon, director of admissions at San Francisco's most sought after private school, is determined to keep her seventeen-year-old daughter, Etta, from making the same mistakes she did. Another relative has her daughter’s back. And as admissions season heats up, Josie discovers that when it comes to matters of the heart--and the office--the biggest surprises lie closest to home.

The authors worked in education for more than twenty years. Good Housekeeping Magazine listed Tiny Imperfections as one of the 20 Best New Fiction Books of 2020 and Good Morning America declared it one of the Mother's Day in Quarantine Books to Buy.

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New York Times bestselling writer, Caroline Leavitt, will talk with Sara DiVello about her new novel With or Without You, on South End Writes via ZOOM, Tuesday, August 18 at 7:00 PM.  With or Without You received a starred Kirkus Review. The Minneapolis StarTribune’ praised Leavitt’s “fearlessness with plot.” The novelist’s earlier novels include Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World.

The novelist is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Fiction and the Goldenberg Fiction Prize. She was also a National Magazine Award Nominee in Personal Essay; a finalist in the Nickelodeon Screenwriting Awards; and a finalist in the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. She reviews books for The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle and People, and has published essays and articles in numerous publications, including New York Magazine, Psychology Today, More, Redbook, and Parenting. Her novel, Cruel Beautiful World, an Indie Next Pick, was named one of the Best Books of the Year by BlogCritics and by The Pulpwood Queens. Pictures of You was named one of the Best Books of the year by Ihe San Francisco Chronicle, The Providence Journal, and Bookmarks. Kirkus Reviews listed as one of its top five books.

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L. Annette Binder  will be back for South End Writes via ZOOM on August 11, 2020 to present her first novel of historical fiction, The Vanishing Sky. She will be joined in the conversation by Sandell Morse, the Maine-based award-winning author of The Spiral Shell: A French village Reveals Its Secrets of Jewish Resistance in World War II. Binder first read at the South End library in October 2012 from her short-story collection, Rise, a 2011 winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, and a finalist in the Colorado Book Awards. For Zoom information, please go to the bottom of this page.

The author, a former attorney and a classics major, was born in Germany but raised and educated in Colorado where her parents moved when she was a child. Her novel is inspired by her family's experiences in World War II Germany. She knew that her father had spent time in the Hitler Youth but they never spoke of it. He died when she was sixteen. As a writer, she told South End Writes in 2012, she finds the seeds of her materials from "something I hear on the street," or "a blip in the newspapers," but that what drives her stories is "character."

In The Vanishing Sky, Binder takes the reader back to a rural setting in Germany near the end of World War II, where Etta Huber and her two young sons have become entrapped by the brutally re-ordered world of the Third Reich. The elder, Max, returns from the Eastern Front, haunted by what he has seen. Georg, Etta’s younger son, is off at a camp run by the Hitler Youth, digging trenches as the Allied armies approach.

"…The Vanishing Sky reveals the German home front as I've never seen it in fiction... Binder tells her story patiently, like an artist placing tiny pieces into a mosaic; this literary novel isn't one to race through. But I find it gripping, powerful, and a brave narrative, unsparing in its honesty…," wrote Larry  Zuckerman for Historical Novels Review. Binder "uses Etta Huber, a hausfrau in a rural village, as a means of feeling her way back into the past, channeling the anguish and uncertainty of the final months of the fighting," said Alida Becker for the New York Times Book Review’s Summer Reading recommendations.

Binder has degrees from Harvard, UC Berkeley and the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Her fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, One Story, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, Third Coast, Fairy Tale Review and others. 

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Saumya Dave , a psychiatrist and mental health advocate, will present her debut novel, Well-behaved Indian Women, on Tuesday, July 28 at 6:30 PM, via ZOOM (details below).  As a writer, Dave explores the unique dynamics of immigrant families, and Well-Behaved Indian Women was inspired by the strong women who surrounded her.

In the novel, three generations of women struggle to define themselves as they pursue their dreams. Simran Mehta has always felt harshly judged by her mother, Nandini, especially when it comes to her little "writing hobby." The mother, for her part, strived to create an easy life for her children in America while putting up with her husband's demanding family and the casual racism of her patients. Nandini’s mother, Mimi Kadakia, feels she failed her daughter in ways she'll never be able to fix­—or forget. As life begins to pull Nandini and Simran apart, Mimi is determined to be the bridge that keeps them connected, even as she carries her own secret burden.

Dave’s essays, articles, and poetry have been featured in The New York Times, ABC News, and Refinery 29, among other places. A practicing therapist, she’s the co-founder with her husband of thisisforHER, a nonprofit that uses art therapy to improve mental health awareness and education for women and girls in low- and middle-income countries. An Adjunct Professor at Mount Sinai, Dave lives in New York City with her family.

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Lis Wiehl was a Fox News legal analyst for 15 years and a reporter/legal analyst for NBC News and NPR’s All Things Considered, before that. She has come out with her second historical thriller in The Hunting Series, titled Hunting the Unabomber: The FBI, Ted Kaczynski, and the Capture of America’s Most Notorious Domestic Terrorist.

The first in the series, Hunting Charles Manson, co-written with Caitlin Rother, was based on a re-examination of the 50-year-old case with new interviews, reviews of original source materials and  dozens of parole hearing transcripts. Wiehl, a former Federal prosecutor, relied on those same research methods to take a fresh look at the search for Theodore Kaczynski, an effort rife with inter-agency law enforcement conflicts that was almost shut down by the 150-member FBI team on the case before a stroke of luck led to the arrest of the criminally insane math prodigy. By that time, Kaczynski had killed three people and maimed more than a dozen others with bombs sent in the mail to random individuals. Wiehl, who lives in New York, is a professor of law at the New York Law School, a private law school in Tribeca, NYC.

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