Reader's Club: Meet the Author

Meet the Author: Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult was born on Long Island, New York and studied creative writing at Princeton University. She had a few short stories published while she was a student. Jodi worked a variety of jobs in the writing field before publishing her first novel Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1992. Jodi and her husband Tim live in Hanover, New Hampshire with their three children. Jodi has written 14 novels and has been awarded numerous writing awards, including the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction in 2003 and a lifetime achievement award for mainstream fiction from the Romance Writers of America.

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Meet the Author: Monica McInerney

Australian-born Monica McInerney is the author of the best-selling novels The Faraday Girls, Family Baggage, The Alphabet Sisters, Spin the Bottle, Upside Down Inside Out and A Taste for It, published internationally and in translation. Her articles and short stories have appeared in newspapers, magazines and anthologies in Australia and Ireland.

In 2006, Monica was the main ambassador for the Australian Government's Books Alive national reading campaign, for which she wrote a limited edition novella called Odd One Out.

Monica, 42, grew up in a family of seven children in the Clare Valley wine region of South Australia, where her father was the railway stationmaster and her mother worked in the local library. Since then Monica has lived all around Australia (in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart) in Ireland (in County Meath and Dublin) and in London and also travelled widely.

She was a book publicist for ten years, working in Ireland and Australia and promoting authors such as Roald Dahl, Tim Winton, Edna O'Brien and Max Fatchen and events such as the Dublin International Writers' Festival.

She has also worked as an event manager and organiser of tourism festivals in the Clare Valley; as a freelance writer/editor and in arts marketing in South Australia; a public relations consultant in Tasmania; a record company press officer in Sydney; a barmaid in an Irish music pub in London and as a temp, grapepicker, hotel cleaner, kindergym instructor and waitress. Her first job out of school as a 17-year-old was as wardrobe girl (and later scriptwriter) for the children's TV show Here's Humphrey at Channel 9 in Adelaide. She is now a full-time writer.

For the past sixteen years she and her Irish husband have been moving back and forth between Australia and Ireland. They currently live in Dublin.

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Meet the Author: Judy Goldman

Judy Goldman is the author of two novels, Early Leaving and The Slow Way Back. She has won numerous literary awards, including the Sir Walter Raleigh Fiction Award the Mary Ruffin Poole First Work of Fiction Award, the Gerald Cable Poetry Award, and was a finalist for the Southeast Booksellers Association's Best Novel of the Year. She is also the author of two books of poetry, her work has been published widely in literary journals, and her commentaries have aired on public radio. Born and raised in Rock Hill, SC, she and her husband live in Charlotte, North Carolina. They have two married children and twin granddaughters.

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Meet the Author: Scott Turow

Scott Turow is the author of seven best-selling novels including Presumed Innocent. He was born in Chicago in 1949. He graduated with high honors from Amherst College in 1970. That year, he received an Edith Mirrielees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which he attended from 1970-1972. From 1972-1975, Mr. Turow taught Creative Writing at Stanford, as E.H. Jones Lecturer. In 1975, he entered Harvard Law School, graduating with honors in 1978. From 1978-1986, he was an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago. He was a prosecutor in the trial of Illinois Attorney General William J. Scott, who was convicted of tax fraud. Mr. Turow was also lead government counsel in a number of the trials connected to Operation Greylord, a federal investigation of corruption into the Illinois judiciary.

Mr. Turow continues to work as an attorney. He has been a partner in the Chicago office of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, a national law firm, since 1986, concentrating on white collar criminal defense, while also devoting a substantial amount of time to pro bono matters. In one such case, he represented Alejandro Hernandez in the successful appeal that preceded Hernandez's release after nearly twelve years in prison, including five on death row, for a murder he did not commit. Mr. Turow has three adult children. He lives outside Chicago and is working on a sequel to Presumed Innocent.

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Meet the Author: Harvey Pekar

Before there was reality television and Jerry Seinfeld, there was Harvey Pekar. And Harvey Pekar knows that ordinary life is pretty complex stuff. For over 30 years, his autobiographical comic book series American Splendor has elevated day-to-day existence into art. The 2003 HBO Films/Fine Line Feature film about his life, American Splendor, won the Sundance International Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, Cannes International Film Festival Fipresci Award, and the National Society of Film Critic's Best Picture Award and brings Pekar to the masses, solidifying his place as a counter-culture hero. At the podium, he is mundane yet poetic, honest and profound and shares his unique views in a not-to-be-missed multi-media presentation.

Pekar worked full-time as a file clerk from 1966 to 2001 in the VA Hospital in Cleveland. In his spare time, beginning in 1972, Pekar has written and self-published the comic book series American Splendor, while his friends-icons in their own right including R Crumb, Frank Stack and Joe Stacco-illustrate his self-professed "rants." American Splendor's" first-person account of Pekar's down-trodden life ranges from the sublime-like chatting with co-workers, going to the market and taking road trips-to the profound, including adopting a daughter and his 1990 brush with cancer.

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