Molly Giles is the author of five award-winning short story collections (Rough Translations, Creek Walk, Bothered, and All The Wrong Places) and a novel, Iron Shoes. Her collection of short stories, Wife With Knife, recently won the Leap Frog Fiction Contest and was published in October of 2021. Her new novel, The Home for Unwed Husbands will be published by Leapfrog in spring 2023. Her memoir, Life Span, will appear in 2024. She attended the Community of Writers Summer Workshop a thousand years ago as a scholarship student and has happily returned as student and staff member many times since. She has won an NEA, an NBCC award for book reviewing, and has taught Fiction Writing at San Francisco State University and The University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. [F] mollygiles.com
2023-saturday
Devi S. Laskar (’04, ’08, ’14, ’15, ’21) is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature (selected by APALA); selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a 2019 book “All Georgians Should Read,” finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award, long-listed for the DSC Prize in South Asian Literature and the Golden Poppy Award. The novel was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019. Laskar’s second novel, Circa, was published on May 3, 2022, by Mariner Books. Her third novel, Midnight, At the War, was published by Mariner Books in Spring 2024. In 2022, USA Today named Laskar among “50 AAPI authors” to read and Goop selected Circa as its June Goop Book Club pick. Laskar holds degrees from Columbia University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. A native of Chapel Hill, N.C., she now lives in California with her family. www.devislaskar.com
Photo Credit: Anjini Laskar
Peter Orner is the author of eight books, most recently the novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, named one of the best books of 2025 by the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune, as well as the essay collections, Still No Word from You, a finalist for the PEN Award for the Art of the Essay, and Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. His story collection Maggie Brown and Others was a New York Times Notable Book. Other books include Love and Shame and Love (Winner of the California Book Award) Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), and Esther Stories. A recipient of the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Orner is also the editor of three books of oral history for the Voice of Witness series, and co-editor with Laura Lampton Scott of a new oral history series from McSweeney’s called “Dispatches.” His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, the Paris Review and has been awarded four Pushcart Prizes. With Yvette Benavides, he’s the co-host of the Lonely Voice Podcast on Texas Public Radio. Orner recently led short courses on James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Melville’s Moby-Dick for the Community of Writers/Writers’ Annex. He teaches at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont. [F/NF]
Photo: Brett Hall Jones
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, On The Rooftop, was a September 2022 Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick. Her second novel, The Revisioners, won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National. Book Award. She lives in Oakland with her family. [F] margaretwilkersonsexton.com