October 23, 2010, Saturday - Second Story: Marina Budhos, Kirsten Cronn-Mills at The Loft

Time 7:00pm

Location: Target Performance Hall at The Loft, 1011 Washinton Avenue South

Cost:  Free

Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction. She has published the novels, Tell Us We’re Home, recently praised by the New York Times as "intelligent and earnestly passionate," Ask Me No Questions, an ALA Notable and winner of the first James Cook Teen Book Award, The Professor of Light, House of Waiting, and a nonfiction book, Remix: Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers. Her short stories, articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications such as The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Literary Review, The Nation, Dissent, Marie Claire, Redbook, Travel & Leisure, Ms., Los Angeles Times, and in numerous anthologies. Budhos has received an EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award), a Rona Jaffe Award for Women Writers, and a Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to India, given talks throughout the country and abroad, and is an associate professor of English and Asian Studies at William Paterson University. She is married to editor and author Marc Aronson and their book, Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science, is also forthcoming in 2010 from Clarion/Houghton Mifflin.

According to geographers, the American West begins at the 100th longitudinal meridian. Thanks to the fact that this meridian is the main street of her Nebraska hometown, Kirstin Cronn-Mills grew up six blocks east of the West. She is a poet as well as a fiction writer, and she holds a Ph.D. from Iowa State University.  Currently, she teaches literature, writing, and critical thinking classes at South Central College in North Mankato, Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and son.  Her first young adult novel, The Sky Always Hears Me and the Hills Don’t Mind (Flux/Llewellyn) was a finalist for the 2010 Minnesota Book Award in Young People’s Literature.