Peter Orner & Pam Petro: Brattleboro LitFest

Peter Orner is the author of the novels The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo and Love and Shame and Love and the story collections Esther Stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, and Maggie Brown & Others, two collections of essays, Still No Word From You and Am I Alone Here?: Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. A three-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Orner’s work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, and has been translated into eight ­languages. He has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a two-year Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the California Book Award for fiction, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish fiction, as well as a Fulbright in Namibia. He is the director of creative writing at Dartmouth College and lives with his family in Norwich, Vermont.

Pam Petro is an author, artist and educator living in Northampton. She has written three place­-based creative nonfiction books as well as articles and essays for many publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Granta and The Paris Review. She was made an honorary fellow of the University of Wales and has received both literary and visual arts residencies and fellowships from Grand Canyon National Park, the MacDowell Colony, the Spring Creek Project and the Black Rock Arts Foundation. Petro is on the creative nonfiction faculty of the Lesley University master of fine arts program in creative writing. She is also a co­founder of the Dylan Thomas International Summer School at the University of Wales. Her new book is The Long Field, a memoir of Wales.