Alice Mattison and Bob Shacochis

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Alice Mattison is the author of many critically acclaimed works of fiction. The New York Times describes her prose as “so crisp that along with all the pleasures of fiction she manages to deliver the particular intellectual satisfactions of an essay or a documentary.”  Mattison’s newest book is The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale. Her most recent novel, When We Argued All Night, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice.  Her collection of connected stories, In Case We're Separated, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction. She’s the author of five earlier novels, including Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn and The Book Borrower, and three earlier collections of stories, as well as a book of poems.  Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and have been reprinted in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories.  She holds a bachelor's degree from Queens College and a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard.  She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Bob Shacochis’ latest novel, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction. Kingdoms in the Air, a collection of Shacochis's travel and adventure essays, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2016. His first novel, Swimming in the Volcano, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Shacochis’ first short-story collection, Easy in the Islands, was published in 1985 and received the National Book Award in category First Work of Fiction. The stories are set in various Caribbean locales and reflect the author's experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Grenadines. His second story collection, The Next New World, widens the author's milieu, containing stories set in Florida and the islands of the Caribbean but also in Northern Virginia and the mid-Atlantic coast. Shacochis has also worked as a journalist and war correspondent. He was a contributing editor to Harper's, which sent him to Haiti in 1994 to cover the uprising against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the island nation's first democratically elected President, and the subsequent intervention by US Army Special Forces, with whom Shacochis traveled for nearly a year covering the invasion. The experience resulted in The Immaculate Invasion, Shacochis's first full-length book of nonfiction. His nonfiction generally fits into the tradition of the New Journalism popularized by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson in the 1960s and 1970s.