Tea and Conversation with Award-Winning Author Ann Hood at Bernardsville Library

Join us for tea and conversation as Julie Maloney, Director of Women Reading Aloud, conducts an up-close and personal interview with award-winning author Ann Hood at Bernardsville Public Library on Sunday, October 23 at 2:00 pm. Audience members will have a rare opportunity to ask the author questions about her work and her writing process. A book signing will follow the interview; books will be available for purchase at the event.

Hood is the best-selling author of ten novels, including her just-launched, "The Book That Matters Most." She is also the acclaimed writer of "The Obituary Writer," in which she explores the theme of grief and "the remedies that can ease, if never entirely banish" it, and in which she explores gender roles and complications of romantic love. A previous novel, "The Knitting Circle," also explored the theme of grief.

Hood's best-selling memoir "Comfort: A Journey Through Grief" (2008), chronicling the death of her five-year-old daughter Grace and her subsequent search for healing, was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly and was a New York Times Editor's Choice. "Do Not Go Gentle: My Search For Miracles in a Cynical Time" (1999) follows Hood's travels to Chimayo, New Mexico in search of a miracle cure for her father's lung cancer. Hood initially wrote about this experience in an essay for Doubletake magazine. That essay went on to win a Pushcart Prize.

Hood is the editor of the anthology "Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting" (2013), in which her essay "Ten Things I Learned From Knitting" appears. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at The New School in New York City. She also teaches at New York University.

The recipient of the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, Hood has published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, O, Bon Appetit, Tin House, The Atlantic Monthly, Real Simple, and among others. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing Awards, Best American Spiritual Writing and Travel Writing Awards, and a Boston Public Library Literary Light Award.

Interviewer Julie Maloney has worked in the arts as a performer and educator her entire life. She is a poet and writer and founder/director of Women Reading Aloud (WRA), a not-for-profit organization that promotes women writers in New Jersey and beyond. WRA holds workshops, special events, writing retreats, conferences and an on-going writing workshop series each spring and fall during which women writers of all genres hone their work in a salon type setting. The annual Writer’s Weekend Retreat is held each April in Sea Girt, NJ. Last June, WRA returned to the island of Alonnisos in the North Sporades for its sixth Writer’s Retreat in Greece. Ms. Maloney is a frequent speaker on “Writing as a Life Tool.”

There is no charge to attend the program at the library, but advance sign-up is requested. Register online at www.bernardsvillelibrary.org and follow the link from Adult Programs, or call the library at 908-766-0118 to sign up.