Alice Mattison and Clifford Thompson

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Alice Mattison’s most recent book is The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale, and her novel, Conscience, was published by Pegasus Books in August. Several of her previous novels and story collections have been New York Times Notable Books or Editors’ Choices, and her story collection won the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction. Mattison’s 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. 

Clifford Thompson received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, published by Autumn House Press, which has also published his memoir, Twin of Blackness (2015). His essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in publications including The Village Voice, The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Commonweal, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Black Issues Book Review. He is the author of a novel, Signifying Nothing.