Pen on Fire Salon with Maile Meloy and Mona Simpson

Our next writers salon will take place on Tuesday, October 12, at 7 p.m. Our authors: Maile Meloy and Mona Simpson.

Maile Meloy's most recent book, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, was a national bestseller in hardcover and a California Book Awards silver medalist, and was named one of the top ten books of 2009 by The New York Times. She is also the author of the story collection Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, and other publications. She has been shortlisted for Britain's Orange Prize, and has received The Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the American Academy of Art and Letters' Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007 she was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

Mona Simpson studied poetry at Berkeley, then worked as a journalist before moving to New York to attend Columbia’s MFA program. During graduate school, she published her first short stories in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review and Mademoiselle. She stayed in New York and worked as an editor at The Paris Review for five years while finishing her first novel, Anywhere But Here, made into a 1999 film starring Susan Sarandon. After that, she wrote The Lost Father, A Regular Guy and Off Keck Road. Her work as been awarded several prizes: a Whiting Prize, a Guggenheim, a grant from the NEA, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Prize, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, a Pen Faulkner finalist, and most recently a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

If you'd like to read more or register, click here. Hope to see you on the 12th!