2011 Nonfiction Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Robert J. Allison

How Do You Write History? - Saturday 2:30 PM

Robert J. Allison is chairman of the history department of Suffolk University in Boston and teaches there and at the Harvard Extension School. In addition to his most recent books, The American Revolution: A Concise History (2011) and A Short History of Cape Cod (2010), he has written The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776-1815 (2000); A Short History of Boston (2004); Stephen Decatur, American Naval Hero (2005); The Boston Massacre (2006); and The Boston Tea Party (2007). He was a consultant to the Commonwealth Museum at the State Archives in Boston, and is a trustee of the USS Constitution Museum in Charlestown, Massachusetts. He is vice president of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, an fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and president of the South Boston Historical Society. He and his family live in South Boston and summers in Provincetown on Cape Cod. Photo Credit: Mark Wilson.

Lois Brown

Opening Ceremony − Friday 6:00 PM

Lois Brown joined the English Department at Mount Holyoke in 1998 and is the first holder of the Elizabeth Small endowed professorship. In 2009, she concluded a five-year term as director of the college's Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts. A recipient of the Mount Holyoke Distinguished Teaching Award, she also has held fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, and Harvard University. Dr. Brown's most recent scholarly work is Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (UNC Press, 2008), a literary biography on a pioneering New England writer, dramatist, performer, and journalist. She edited the first modern edition of an 1835 work entitled Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar Aged Six Years and Eleven Months by Susan Paul (Harvard UP, 2000) which is the earliest known work of African American biography and the first published prose narrative by an African American woman. Susan Paul and her family were close allies of William Lloyd Garrison and influential members of the larger Boston abolitionist community. Her current book project is a biography of Bostonian Nancy Prince and she also is immersing herself in research and writing on the African Americans in colonial and antebellum Concord, Massachusetts. Dr. Brown's passion for African American history, women’s history and writing, and public history has led to several opportunities to curate and to collaborate on exhibitions with the Museum of African-American History in Boston and the Boston Public Library.

Kate Clifford Larson

Opening Ceremony − Friday 6:00 PM

Kate Clifford Larson, PhD., is an historian and leading Harriet Tubman scholar and the author of Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (Ballantine/One World, 2004), one of the first non-juvenile Tubman biographies published in six decades. With degrees from Simmons College and Northeastern University, and a doctorate in history from the University of New Hampshire, Larson specializes in 19th and 20th century U.S. Women’s and African American History. She is currently the consulting historian for the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, an All-American Road, and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Discovery Center. She has also served as the consulting historian for the National Park Service’s Harriet Tubman Special Resource Study, resulting in legislation for the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park Act, now awaiting approval in Congress. She teaches at Simmons and Wheelock colleges in Boston. Her second book, The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln (Basic Books), was released in 2008, and she is currently at work on a biography of Rosemary, the disabled sister of President John F. Kennedy.

Marie Cloutier

Book Bloggers: A Conversation About Books with
the People who Blog About Them - Saturday 11:00 AM

Marie Cloutier is a librarian and blogger. She writes reviews and interviews at www.BostonBibliophile.com and has worked in Jewish libraries since 2007; most recently, she worked from January 2010-2011 as a social media consultant for the Association of Jewish Libraries. She is passionate about community-based libraries serving special populations, and using social media to connect the literary world.

Kevin Cooney

Book Bloggers: A Conversation About Books with
the People who Blog About Them - Saturday 11:00 AM

Kevin Cooney is lead-writer for www.Bostonbookbums.com a news, feature and review blog covering fiction and non-fiction books. A Massachusetts native with a diverse spectrum of interests and expertise, Cooney’s professional background includes journalism and marketing.

Denise DeRenzo Lacey

Book Bloggers: A Conversation About Books with
the People who Blog About Them - Saturday 11:00 AM

Denise DeRenzo Lacey, the Director of Clinical Planning at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, started the blog Ever-Fixed Mark six years ago as an unsentimental chronicle of the adoption process. She is a returned Peace Corps volunteer from Tunisia, which recently orchestrated a revolution using Facebook and Twitter, and she is fascinated by the power of social media to effect political change and achieve business objectives.

Andre Dubus III

Andre Dubus III reads from Townie - Saturday 1:00 PM

Andre Dubus III is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, and the novels Bluesman, House of Sand and Fog, and The Garden of Last Days, a New York Times bestseller. His memoir, Townie, was released in February 2011 with W.W. Norton & Co. His work has been included in The Best American Essays of 1994, The Best Spiritual Writing of 1999, and The Best of Hope Magazine. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for fiction, The Pushcart Prize, and was a Finalist for the Rome Prize Fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. An Academy Award-nominated motion picture and published in twenty languages, his novel House of Sand and Fog was a fiction finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Booksense Book of the Year, and was an Oprah Book Club Selection and #1 New York Times bestseller. A member of PEN American Center, Andre Dubus III has served as a panelist for The National Book Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught writing at Harvard University, Tufts University, Emerson College, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell where is a full-time faculty member. He is married to performer Fontaine Dollas Dubus. They live in Massachusetts with their three children. Andre was recently interviewed on National Public Radio. Hear his interview and read an excerpt from Townie. WBUR

Eric Etheridge

The Civil Rights Movement at Its Peak - Saturday 1:00 PM

Eric Etheridge is the photographer and author of Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. He has worked as an editor at a number of magazines, including Rolling Stone, 7 Days, the New York Observer and Harper’s magazine. He has also worked online, creating and running websites for Microsoft, the New York Times and others. A native of Mississippi, he lives in New York City with his wife and their daughter.

Charles Euchner

The Civil Rights Movement at Its Peak - Saturday 1:00 PM

Charles Euchner is an author and teacher. The author of Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington (Beacon Press, 2010) and eight other books, Euchner is the creator of The Writing Code, the only brain-based system to master writing in all genres (www.thewritingcodesystem.com). Euchner's previous books include The Last Nine Innings, Urban Policy Reconsidered (with Steven McGovern), Extraordinary Politics, and Playing the Field. A former journalist, Euchner has taught at Yale, Holy Cross, St. Mary's College, and Northeastern and he directed a public policy think tank at Harvard. Euchner, who directed the City of Boston's long-term planning initiative, speaks widely on civil rights and "the writing revolution." Euchner earned a B.A. at Vanderbilt University and an M.A. and Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University.

Paul Finkelman

A Covenant With Death and an Agreement in Hell: William Lloyd Garrison's Constitutional Theory - Saturday 9:00 AM

Paul Finkelman is the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at Albany Law School. He received his BA from Syracuse University and his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. He was later a fellow in Law and Humanities at Harvard Law School. He is the author of more than 25 books and 200 scholarly articles on legal history, slavery, constitutional law, and United States history. His book Slavery and the Founders is one of the most cited studies of how slavery shaped the creation of the United States. That book demonstrates the correctness of William Lloyd Garrison's analysis that the Constitution was a proslavery document. He has served as a consultant to the Library of Congress, the National Underground Railroad Museum, and many other cultural institution. Professor Finkelman has appeared in numerous PBS and History Channel programs, including the Ken Burns special on Thomas Jefferson, the American Experience program on John Brown, and Henry Louis Gates's African American Lives. Millard Fillmore, his biography of America's Thirteenth President, will be out this spring in the Times Books series, The American Presidents.

Ellen Fitzpatrick

Opening Ceremony − Friday 6:00 PM

Ellen Fitzpatrick, a professor and scholar specializing in modern American political and intellectual history, is the author and editor of six books and has appeared regularly on PBS’s “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.” She received her PhD in history from Brandeis University and has been interviewed as an expert on modern American political history by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, Washington Post, CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and National Public Radio. She has recently released Letters To Jackie, the first book to ever examine the extraordinary collection of condolence letters to Jacqueline Kennedy. Fitzpatrick creates an incredible portrait of the nation’s grief from such a cross-section of American life. The Carpenter Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, where she has been recognized for Excellence in Public Service, Ellen Fitzpatrick lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
Photo by Lisa Nugent.

Jean Foley Doyle

Life in Newburyport: 1950 – 1985 - Saturday 1:00 PM

Jean Foley Doyle, a lifelong resident of Newburyport, Massachusetts, is the mother of seven and grandmother of eleven children. She graduated from Newburyport High School (NHS) in 1947 and joined the ranks of her peers who married young and started their families after World War II, thus contributing to the baby boomer generations. She stayed at home for the next nineteen years. Finally able to achieve her dream of a college education, she graduated summa cum laude from Merrimack College in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in history. In 1972, she earned her master’s degree in history from the University of New Hampshire. Returning to her alma mater, Jean taught history and international relations for thirty years until her retirement in 1999. While teaching at NHS, Jean was responsible for implementing the highly successful community service program which allowed hundreds of students to get to know and contribute to the Newburyport community. Jean is the author of Life in Newburyport 1900 - 1950 and Life in Newburyport 1950 - 1985. An avid gardener, she lives in Newbury, Massachusetts.

Bethany Groff

Dirty, Sexy Newbury: Love, Death, and Barnyard Brawls in Early Newbury History - Saturday 9:00 AM

Bethany Groff is the author of A Brief History of Old Newbury (History Press), and the North Shore Regional Site Manager for Historic New England where she is responsible for four early Newbury houses. She is also the chair of the Historic Sites Professional Affiliation Group of the New England Museum Association, and serves on the boards of the Newburyport Preservation Trust and the North of Boston CVB. She was the recipient of the Pioneer in Preservation Award from the Essex National Heritage Commission in 2005 and the North of Boston CVB Leadership Award in 2007. She has an MA in History from the University of Massachusetts, and has published articles in the New England Quarterly and Historic New England Magazine. Bethany lives in Newburyport with her husband and children. Photo credit: Eva Timothy.

Drew Hendrickson

The Ins and Outs of Sports Writing - Saturday 2:30 PM

Drew Hendrickson lives in Portland, ME and works as a mentor for at-risk and delinquent youth. He recently graduated from Union Theological Seminary with a Master's of Divinity degree. He has experience working with refugee communities in South America and Africa. Drew is also a sports enthusiast and a die-hard fan of all Boston sports teams.

Dyke Hendrickson

Migration and Mill Cities in the late 19th and 20th Century New England -
Saturday 10:00 AM

Building a Mystery - Saturday 1:00 PM

Journalist Dyke Hendrickson has been a writer and/or editor with the Portland Press Herald, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Boston Herald. On several occasions his award-winning feature stories have led to books. He has written two texts about the French Canadian migration to New England in the 19th and 20th centuries: Franco-Americans of Maine (Arcadia, Charleston, SC, 2010) and Quiet Presence: Stories of Franco-Americans in New England (Gannett Press, Portland, 1980). His work in historical writing is excerpted at the Museum of National Heritage at Ellis Island, NY. He has also written a novel, Last Night in Hollywood (New Sharon Press, Portland, 2005) and is working on a fourth book, Faulkner in Love.

John Hanson Mitchell

Time, Place and the Endurance of the Natural World - Saturday 9:00 AM

John Hanson Mitchell is best known for his incisive characterizations, his evocations of time and place, and his lyrical style. Mitchell concentrated much of his earlier work on a square mile tract of land known as Scratch Flat, 35 miles northwest of Boston. He has written four books dealing with the natural and human history of the tract, the best known of which is Ceremonial Time, a fifteen thousand year history of the area. Other books, including Walking Towards Walden, Trespassing, and A Field Guide to Your Own Backyard, deal with the local environment and the nature of the idea of place, an abiding theme for Mitchell. He is editor of the award winning magazine Sanctuary, published by the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He was editor of The Curious Naturalist, and a co-author, with Chris Leahy and Tom Conuel, of The Nature of Massachusetts, published in 1998. In 2000, he was given the New England Booksellers’ Award for the body of his work, and in 2001 he won a Vogelstein grant for Following the Sun, He was awarded an honorary PhD from Fitchburg State University for his work on the book Ceremonial Time and received three different grants for his work on Looking for Mr. Gilbert. He is also winner of the John Burroughs Essay Award for his Sanctuary piece, “Of Time and the River”. His most recent book is The Paradise of all These Parts: A Natural History of Boston (2008). Mitchell is currently at work on a book about Robin Hood and land rights.

Steve Puleo

Stephen Puleo reads from A City So Grand - Saturday 11:00 AM

Stephen Puleo is an author, historian, university teacher, public speaker, and communications professional. His fourth book, A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900 was released May 1 (2010) by Beacon Press. In pre-publication praise for the book, bestselling novelist Dennis Lehane said: “A City So Grand is a book so grand. It's been quite awhile since I've read anything--fiction or non-fiction--so enthralling. My only complaint is that it ended.” Two of his previous books, Dark Tide and Due to Enemy Action have been subjects of History Channel programs, and Puleo has also discussed Dark Tide on C-Span’s Book TV. Dark Tide has also been selected by 13 communities in Massachusetts as the book of choice for town-wide reading programs (including Boston in 2010), and was selected by the Boston Authors Club as a finalist for its prestigious Julia Ward Howe Award for literary merit. Stephen Puleo resides with his wife, Kate, south of Boston. He donates a portion of his book proceeds to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).

Dawn Rennert

Book Bloggers: A Conversation About Books with
the People who Blog About Them - Saturday 11:00 AM

Dawn Rennert is an avid reader who is especially fond of social history, personal memoir, literary fiction, and children's picture books. She enjoys connecting readers and books via her active book blog, She Is Too Fond of Books (founded in early 2008), and as the Community Relations Coordinator for her local independent bookstore, the Concord Bookshop, in Concord, MA. Dawn is an advocate for independent bookstores, highlighting them both on her primary blog and on Spotlight on NYC Bookstores. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Sarah Rettger

Book Bloggers: A Conversation About Books with
the People who Blog About Them - Saturday 11:00 AM

Sarah Rettger is equally at home behind the counter of an independent bookstore and at her computer, covering the book industry. At Archimedes Forgets http://sarahrettger.blogspot.com, she blogs about children's and young adult books, journalism, and Jane Eyre.

Scott Ridley

Scott Ridley reads from Morning of Fire:
John Kendrick's Daring American Odyssey in the Pacific - Saturday 1:00 PM

Scott Ridley is a policy analyst and author who has written for the Nation, The New Republic, Newsday, Denver Post and a host of other publications. He is co-author of the book Power Struggle: The Hundred Year War Over Electricity and has received grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Descended from a long line of New England sailors and shipbuilders, he has studied and collected books and artifacts on maritime life for forty years. He lives with his family in East Harwich, Massachusetts.
Photo Credit: Carole Ridley

Tom Ryan

Following Atticus - Saturday 10:00 AM

Tom Ryan is the founder of the Newburyport Massachusetts newspaper The Undertoad and served as its publisher and editor for over a decade. In 2007 he sold the newspaper and moved to the White Mountains of New Hampshire with his dog, Atticus M. Finch where they continue to live. Over the last five years, Tom and Atticus have climbed more than 450 4,000-foot peaks. They have used their winter hikes to raise money for the Jimmy Fund and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and for Angell Animal Medical Center. In October of 2008 the pair were inducted into the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA) Hall of Fame as co recipients of the “Human Hero of the Year Award.” Tom currently writes the popular “The Adventures of Tom & Atticus” column in the North Country News and Mountainside Guide and the blog “The Adventures of Tom and Atticus.” He is the author of Following Atticus which will be released by William Morrow in September of 2011.

Frank Schaeffer

Frank Schaeffer reads from Patience With God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism) - Saturday 11:00 AM

Frank Schaeffer is the author of the New York Times bestseller Keeping Faith and the memoir Crazy for God. He has appeared on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. In Patience With God, Schaeffer offers a middle ground for those who find right-wing evangelists as distasteful as the uber-liberal lefties who mock them. As Schaeffer explains, there are a whole bunch of people out there—Republican and Democrat—who are disgusted with the polarizing forces that exist in our nation, and who believe (or at least try to believe) in God. And there are stats to back his view, with the most recent American Religious Identification Survey showing 85% of the country adheres to some form of religion. A prolific blogger for the Huffington Post, he and his wife, Genie, live in Massachusetts and have three children. His next book, Sex, Mom, and God, will be published in June.

Glenn Stout

The Ins and Outs of Sports Writing - Saturday 2:30 PM

A full-time author since 1993, Glenn Stout has written, ghostwritten or edited nearly eighty books. Stout is the author of Fenway 1912(due out in the Fall of 2011) Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World, and the text for The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball, The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball, Nine Months at Ground Zero, Yankees Century (selected by Book Magazine one of the five “Best Sports Books of 2002”), Red Sox Century(finalist for the New England Book Award in non-fiction), Jackie Robinson: Between the Baselines, Joe DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life and Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”) He has also edited several anthologies, including Everything They Had: Sports Writing from David Halberstam. He has served as Series Editor of The Best American Sports Writing series since its inception in 1991, authored the text for thirty-nine titles in the best-selling Matt Christopher sports biography series for the juvenile market, and is the creator and author of the "Good Sports" non-fiction juvenile series for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (Sandpiper). Stout writes a monthly column for Boston Baseball, serves as the baseball analyst for WBUR-FM, and has published dozens of articles and columns in publications such as The New York Observer, ESPN.com, Runner’s World, The Sporting News, Baseball America, Sports Illustrated, and Boston Magazine. He is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada and lives on Lake Champlain in Vermont.

Eva Timothy

The Genius We Are Born To - Saturday 11:00 AM

Eva Timothy has been fascinated by history for as long as she can remember. Growing up in Europe she was continually surrounded by the stories of the great explorers, artists and inventors. Eva’s own learning journey has taken her from the University of Utah where she received a B.A. in Communications - emphasis on film and photography to a certification program at The Oxford School of Photography and a Licentiateship Certification from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of The U.S. Library of Congress (Permanent Collection), The Fox Talbot Museum (UK), The British Library, Green Templeton College (Oxford University), The Smithsonian, The George Eastman House Library and The Victoria Albert Museum (National Art Library). In her debut monograph, Lost in Learning: The Art of Discovery, Eva has woven this worldview of learning, history and art into a creation which urges us each to pursue our life’s dreams with greater passion.

Ghlee E. Woodworth

Tiptoe Through the Tombstones, Oak Hill Cemetery - Saturday 11:00 AM

Ghlee E. Woodworth, a twelfth-generation Newburyport native, is author of Tiptoe Through the Tombstones, Oak Hill Cemetery, a local history that explores the lives of eighty individuals who made significant contributions to the Newburyport community in the 1800’s. The book was honored at the New England Book Festival in 2009 as runner-up book of the year, winner of the book design of the year and runner-up in the biography/autobiography category of the year; the New York Book Festival in 2010 honored the book as runner-up in the biography/autobiography category as well. In addition, the book was named as one of seventy-five nationwide finalists by the American Association for State and Local History in their 2010 awards program. She is currently working on the Clipper Heritage Trail, a series of self-guided history tours which will take the participant on a journey through Newburyport history in the 1700’s and 1800’s. The trail will be launched during the summer of 2011. www.tiptoethroughthetombstones.com.