2010 Featured Authors
Jennifer Allison, author of the Gilda Joyce mystery series, holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.F.A. from American University. Her various careers have included work as a news reporter and high school English teacher. She currently lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Michael, and their three children
Eleanor Clift is a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine. Her column, “Capitol Letter,” is posted each Friday on Newsweek.com. Clift is a regular panelist on the syndicated talk show, “The McLaughlin Group.” She has appeared as herself in several movies, including “Dave,” “Independence Day,” “Murder at 1600,” “Rising Sun,” and the CBS series, “Murphy Brown.” In 2008, she wrote Two Weeks of Life: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Politics, which connects the events of her own life and those of the nation.
Craig Crawford is a writer and television political commentator based in Washington , D.C., a columnist for Congressional Quarterly, a blogger at CQPolitics.com and the author of three books. His most recent book, Listen Up Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do, was co-authored with Helen Thomas.
Kirstin Downey is an award-winning journalist and former business writer for the Washington Post. Downey was part of the Washington Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the campus slayings at Virginia Tech. She left the Washington Post in 2008 to focus on finishing her biography of Frances Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience.
Deanna Fei, author of A Thread of Sky, was born in Flushing, New York, and has lived in Beijing and Shanghai, China. A graduate of Amherst College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a Fulbright grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Chinese cultural scholarship, among other awards. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches in public schools and is at work on her second novel.
Peter Goodman is the national economics correspondent for The New York Times and a contributor to the paper’s award-winning fall 2008 series, “The Reckoning.” He has received many honors, including the Jesse Laventhol Prize for Deadline News Reporting, the Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club and the Hugo Shong Journalist of the Year Award for Reporting on Asia. Goodman’s most recent book is Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy.
John Harwood is Chief Washington Correspondent of CNBC and a political writer for the New York Times. Harwood offers political analysis on NBC's "Meet the Press" and PBS's "Washington Week in Review," among other television and radio programs. His most recent book, Pennsylvania Avenue, Profiles in Backroom Power, offers a unique look at how today's Washington power game really works.
Haynes Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a best selling author, and a television commentator.
He is the author of 14 books, five of them national bestsellers, including his most recent work, The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election, co-authored with Washington Post correspondent Dan Balz. He is a professor and Knight Chair in journalism at the University of Maryland.

 
Ronald Kessler is an American journalist and New York Times bestselling author of 18 non-fiction books. He is the chief Washington, D.C. correspondent of the conservative news and commentary blog Newsmax.com. Kessler has won 16 journalism awards, including two George Polk awards, for national reporting and for community service. Kessler also has won the American Political Science Association's Public Affairs Reporting Award, the Associated Press' Sevellon Brown Memorial Award, and Washingtonian magazine's Washingtonian of the Year Award. Kessler’s most recent book is In the President's Secret Service.
John Koethe is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. His collection Falling Water won the Kingsley Tufts Award. North Point North: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Sarah Pekkanen’s work has been published in People, TheWashington Post, USA Today, The New Republic, The Baltimore Sun, Reader’s Digest and Washingtonian, among others. Her debut novel, The Opposite of Me, will be published in March 2010. She writes a monthly column for Bethesda Magazine, and has been an on-air contributor to NPR and E! Entertainment’s “Gossip Show.” She is the winner of a Dateline award and the Paul Miller Reporting Fellowship. Sarah lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland with her husband and three young sons.
Jon Scieszka is the author of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, the Time Warp Trio series, The Stinky Cheese Man, and a truckload of other books that inspire kids to want to read. His work as an elementary school teacher and as founder of a literacy initiative for boys (www.guysread.com) drove him to create Trucktown, a crazy, fun action series for the youngest readers.
Gerald Seib is the Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. He also writes the paper’s "Capital Journal" column and is a regular commentator on Washington affairs for CNBC, cable television. Seib has won many awards, and was part of the team from The Wall Street Journal that received the 2001 Pulitzer Prize “breaking news” category for its coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. His latest book, Pennsylvania Avenue, Profiles in Backroom Power, is co-authored with John Harwood.
Helen Thomas is a legendary journalist and bestselling author who hascovered the administrations of ten presidents in a career spanning nearly sixty years. She was the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents Association, and, in 1975, the first female member of the Gridiron Club. She has written five books; her latest with co-author Craig Crawford is Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do.

Simon Van Booy grew up in the mountains of Wales and in Oxford.  In 2002 he was awarded an M.F.A. from Southampton College and won the H.R. Hays Poetry Award. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times and New York Post, and he lectures regularly at the School of Visual Arts, Long Island University and Southampton Library.  His first collection of short stories, the critically acclaimed The Secret Lives of People in Love, has been translated into eight languages.  Van Booy is also the author of Love Begins in Winter, which won the 2009 Frank O’Connor, the world’s largest prize for short stories. 

 

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