Lyceum Agency - Issues & Ideas

Women Authors

Diana Abu-Jaber
Author │ Journalist │ Essayist

"I grew up inside the shape of my father’s stories. A Jordanian immigrant, Dad regaled us with tales about himself, his country, and his family that both entertained us and instructed us about the place he’d come from and the way he saw the world. These stories exerted a powerful influence on my imagination, in terms of what I chose to write about, the style of my language, and the form my own stories took.

Selected Books: Origin, The Language of Baklava, Crescent

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Ana Castillo

Author │ Essayist │ Poet

“An always skilled storyteller, [Castillo] grounds her writing in . . . humor, love, suspense and heartache–that draw the reader in.”

–Chicago Sunday Sun-Times

In novels, short stories, poems, and essays, Castillo explores what Ibis Gomez-Vega has called “those segments of the American population often separated by class, economics, gender, and sexual orientation.” Castillo’s works nevertheless transcend boundaries of politics, class, and gender, making her “one of a few Mexican American writers who have attracted the attention of the mainstream reading public” (Ibis Gomez-Vega). Castillo’s prose blends elements of oral history and established literary tradition with innovation and experimentation: she has been called “the most daring and experimental of Latino novelists” (Ilan Stavans).

Selected Books: The Guardians, So Far From God

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Connie May Fowler
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Memoirist

"When I was a small girl, my parents fought every night. My sister and I would huddle together in our bedroom and I would beg her to read to me so that the sound of their voices might be drowned out. And so she would begin, reading to me from my children's books, night after night. Even then, before I had learned to read, I knew intimately the soul-saving power of literature."

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Elizabeth Gilbert
Bestselling Author │ Short Story Writer │ Memoirist

Oprah Winfrey calls her a “rock star author.” Annie Proulx calls her “a writer of incandescent talent.” A New York magazine editor calls her the “Queen of Quirk,” and goes on to say, “She has an awful lot of humor and charm, and she’s one of those few writers who writes the way she talks.” And talks the way she writes, we might add—with intelligence, wit and not just a shade of the performer behind her expressive and insightful presentations.

Selected Books: The Last American Man, Eat Pray Love, Committed

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Alice Hoffman
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Short Story Writer

Alice Hoffman has been called “America’s literary heir to the Brothers Grimm” and her luminous and remarkable “fables of the everyday” have enchanted readers since the publication of her first novel, Property Of, in 1977. More than 30 years later, with numerous acclaimed and bestselling novels (as well as two short story collections and many books for young adults), Hoffman continues to seduce readers into her vividly imagined world.

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A.M. Homes
Novelist │ Memoirist │ Essayist

A.M. Homes is that rare writer whose work successfully elides the distinction between high art and pop culture. In incendiary and brilliantly crafted fiction, Homes shocks and sometimes disgusts, but never fails to entertain as she tears down the façade of suburban normality to reveal the darkness within.

In her impressionistic art criticism, Homes has brought levity and creativity to a hidebound genre. And her inspiring lectures on creativity have spurred other writers and artists to abandon fear and mediocrity and take real risks in their work. Iconoclastic, daring, fiercely real—A.M. Homes is one of the most provocative literary voices today.

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Sue Monk Kidd
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Essayist

Sue Monk Kidd’s stunning bestselling debut novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), has enchanted critics and readers alike, bringing her literary renown and establishing her as one of the most popular writers working today. Taught widely in colleges and high schools, The Secret Life of Bees is Southern storytelling at its finest and is fast becoming a modern classic. The novel has spent more than two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list, sold six million copies, and been translated into 23 languages. It was produced onstage in New York and was made into an award-winning movie released in the fall of 2008. Barnes and Noble listed The Secret Life of Bees as the sixth bestselling book of the decade.

Selected Books: The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair

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Ursula K. Le Guin
Bestselling Author │ Novelist │ Poet │ Essayist

Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She graduated from Radcliffe College and studied at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953. They have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and they have three children and four grandchildren.

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Julie Powell
Bestselling Author │ Memoirist │ Blogger

On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, stuck in a dead-end secretarial job, living in a hideous apartment in Long Island City, Queens, and dreading what seemed like a life of terminal mediocrity, I came up with a panicked notion—to cook through all 524 recipes of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year, and blog about it. Julie and Julia describes my efforts to hold on to my job, marriage, and sanity while blazing a nonsensical trail toward fulfillment,with Julia leading the way."

Julie Powell

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Rebecca Skloot
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Educator

Bestselling author Rebecca Skloot spent over ten years doggedly uncovering the truth about the life, death and ultimate "immortality" of a poor black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks. On a tumultuous educational path until a community college biology instructor utter the words "Henrietta Lacks," Skloot—with remarkable focus and tenacity—set off on a trajectory that would shine the national spotlight on both and become the phenomenal book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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Krista Tippett
Author │ Radio Show Host │ Journalist

“It’s always been very important to me to enlarge imaginations about how this part of life we call religious and spiritual actually works in real, far-flung, 21st-century lives.”

—Krista Tippett

Peabody Award winning broadcaster Krista Tippett grew up in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and spent most of the 1980’s in divided Germany. She was The New York Times stringer in Berlin and also reported for Newsweek, The International Herald Tribune, the BBC, and Die Zeit. Later she served as a special political assistant and chief Berlin aide to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany.

Selected Books: Speaking of Faith, Einstein's God

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Norah Vincent
Bestselling Author │ Cultural Critic │ Journalist

Norah Vincent is a freelance journalist by trade. In 2003, she took a leave from writing her nationally syndicated political opinion columns in order to write her New York Times bestselling book Self-Made Man, the story of a woman living, working, and dating--all while disguised as a man.

Shrewd, sympathetic, and courageous, Self-Made Man is one woman’s take on just how hard it is to be a man, even in a man’s world. With an ever-present five o’clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rimmed glasses, and her own size 11½ shoes, Norah Vincent spent a year and a half as her male alter ego, Ned, and reported back what she observed incognito. Narrating her journey with exquisite insight, empathy, and humor, Norah ponders the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as she explores firsthand who men really are when women aren’t around. As Ned, she joins a bowling team, takes a high-octane sales job, goes on dates with women (and men), visits strip clubs, and even manages to infiltrate a monastery and a men’s therapy group. Absolutely engrossing in its reporting and surprising in its analysis, Self-Made Man is a thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism.

Selected Books: Self-Made Man, Voluntary Madness

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Ayelet Waldman
Bestselling Author │ Mystery Writer │ Novelist

Maternal ambivalence is my subject,” says the provocative novelist and essayist Ayelet Waldman. In her bestselling collection of essays, Bad Mother, her popular Mommy Track Mystery series, in her critically acclaimed literary novels, and pieces that have appeared in The New York Times, Elle, The Guardian, Salon.com and others, Waldman brings refreshing candor to the socially-charged issues of wifehood, motherhood, sexuality and family.

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