Author Salon Series

Myriam J.A. Chancy, Ph.D. is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair of the Humanities at Scripps College. She is the author of  What Storm, What Thunder, a novel on the 2010 Haiti earthquake (HarperCollins Canada/Tin House USA 2021), awarded a 2022 American Book Award (ABA) from the Before Columbus Foundation, and named a “Best Book of 2021,” by NPR, Kirkus, the Chicago Public Library, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, Amazon Books & Canada’s Globe & Mail. WS, WT was also shortlisted for the Caliba Golden Poppy Award, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and longlisted for Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize & the OCM Bocas Prize. Her past novels include: The Loneliness of Angels, winner of the 2011 Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award, for Best Fiction 2010; The Scorpion’s Claw and Spirit of Haiti, shortlisted in the Best First Book Category, Canada/Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Prize, 2004. Her recent writings have appeared in Whetstone.com Journal, Electric Literature, Guernica and Room Magazine.

Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, I Have Some Questions for You, is to be released this February from Viking. Her last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada University and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Andrew Sean Greer, former Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his sixth book, Less. “A generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.” His next book will be Less is Lost (Little Brown, September 20, 2022), a sequel to Less. Recently he was guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2022.

Lynne Thompson is the 2021-2022  Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and the recipient of a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Thompson’s honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award (poetry) and the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and Best American Poetry, to name a few.

A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem and Scripps College, her alma mater. She facilitates private workshops, most recently for Beyond Baroque, Poetry By the Sea Conference, Moorpark College Writers Festival, and Central Coast Writers’ Conference. Thompson is a native of Los Angeles, California, where she resides.

Luis J. Rodriguez believes a writer can change the world.
Through the power of words, this acclaimed poet, novelist, children’s book author and journalist saw his way out of poverty and despair.
Successful as a Chicano poet, Rodriguez thought he had put the streets and his own days as a gang member behind him—until his young son joined a gang. Rodriguez fought for his child by telling his own story in the national bestseller Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. This vivid memoir explores gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that haunts its participants.  A New York Times Notable Book, Always Running was named one of the nation’s 100 most censored titles by the American Library Association. The book has been included on school reading lists nationwide but has often been the subject of controversy due to its frank depictions of gang life.

Jean is the 2023 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Scripps College. She is a doctoral candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at USC, and she holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Jean has taught literature seminars and creative writing workshops at USC, UNLV, UCLA Extension, and the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Jean is a Kundiman fellow, and has been a writer-in-residence at Tin House, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, I-Park Foundation, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and The Mastheads. In 2019-20, she was the W.M. Keck and George & Arlene Cheng Research Fellow at the Huntington Library, where she worked on an archival project on gender and racial violence in 19th-century Los Angeles Chinatown (the subject of her next book project). Jean is a board member at Kaya Press, an independent publisher of experimental writing from the Asian Pacific Islander diaspora. Born in Taiwan and raised in Southern California, she currently lives in Los Angeles.

Dwandalyn R. Reece is Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She brings more than 30 years of knowledge and experience in the museum field, including more than ten years at NMAAHC as Curator of Music and Performing Arts. In that role she built a collection of over 4,000 objects, curated the museum’s inaugural permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads, for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017, curated the museum’s grand opening music festival, Freedom Sounds, served as executive committee chair of the pan-institutional group Smithsonian Music, and co-curated the Smithsonian Year of Music initiative in 2019.  Prior to her tenure with NMAAHC, Dwan worked as a Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities. She ​also has worked previously as the Assistant Director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Chief Curator at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Curator at the Motown Museum in Detroit.  Dwan serves on the Board of Trustees for her alma mater, Scripps College.

Susan Choi and her work have been praised by many. Joan Didion describes her as “A natural—a writer whose intelligence and historical awareness effortlessly serve a breathtaking narrative ability.” Jennifer Egan says Choi’s work is “Deeply impressive, confident… astute, psychologically persuasive.” While Jhumpa Lahiri says Choi writes “with uncompromising grace and mastery.” Choi’s fifth novel, Trust Exercise, won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. Described as “electrifying” (People) and “thrilling” (Boston Globe), it tells the story of a group of teenagers at a competitive arts school somewhere in American suburbia in the 1980s. Two of the students in the group fall in love, and this world makes a certain sense until the author upends everything and the boundaries of fiction and reality are pushed in a tale that is itself a trust exercise for readers.

Tracy K. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars. The collection draws upon the genre of science fiction in considering who we humans are and what the vast universe holds for us. In poems of political urgency, tenderness, elegy and wit, Smith conjures version upon version of the future, imagines the afterlife, and contemplates life here on earth in our institutions, cities, houses and hearts. Life on Mars was a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.