A Nonfiction Reading with Deborah Baker, Jill Bialosky, and Rebecca van Laer (In-Person)

Please join us on May 3 for an afternoon of compelling nonfiction from Deborah Baker, Jill Bialosky, and Rebecca van Laer! (In-Person at HVWC).

Deborah Baker is the author of A Blue Hand and The Last Englishmen. Her biography In Extremis was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and her book The Convert was a finalist for the National Book Award. Charlottesville is her sixth work of narrative non-fiction. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and she is a former Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn and Charlottesville.

Jill Bialosky's newest work of prose is The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother. Her most recent volume of poetry Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, four critically acclaimed novels, most recently, The Deceptions, a finalist for the Gotham Book Award, and two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Paris Review and Best American Poetry among others. She co-edited with Helen Schulman the anthology, Wanting a Child. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. In 2014 she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry.

Rebecca van Laer is the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022) and a memoir, Cat (Object Lessons/Bloomsbury, 2025). Her fiction and essays appear in the New England Review, Joyland, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD from Brown University, where she studied queer and feminist autobiography.