Great Writers, Great Readings Series

Martha McPhee

17th Annual Great Writers, Great Readings Series – Spring 2020
Wednesday, September 23, at 6:30 p.m
Virtual event. For more information, please call 516-463-5669.

Martha McPhee is the author of the novels An Elegant Woman, Dear Money, L’America, Gorgeous Lies, and Bright Angel Time.  Her work has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  In 2002 she was nominated for a National Book Award.  Her novels have been Best Books of The Year on The New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune lists.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Newark Star Ledger, Vogue, More, Harper’s Bazaar, Self, Traveler, Travel & Leisure, among many others. McPhee is a tenured member of the English Department at Hofstra University, where she teaches fiction. She lives in New York City with her children and husband, the poet and writer Mark Svenvold.

Drawn from Professor McPhee’s own family history, An Elegant Woman is a story of discovery and reinvention, following four generations of women in one American family. As Isadora, a novelist, and two of her sisters sift through the artifacts of their forebears’ lives, trying to decide what to salvage and what to toss, the narrative shifts to a winter day in 1910 at a train station in Ohio. Two girls wait in the winter cold with their mother--the mercurial Glenna Stewart--to depart for a new life in the W​est. As Glenna campaigns in Montana for women’s suffrage and teaches in one-room schoolhouses, Tommy takes care of her little sister, Katherine: trapping animals, begging, keeping house, cooking, while Katherine goes to school. When Katherine graduates, Tommy makes a decision that will change the course of both of their lives.

A profound meditation on memory, history, and legacy, An Elegant Woman follows one woman over the course of the 20th century, taking the reader from a drought-stricken farm in Montana to a yellow Victorian in Maine; from the halls of a psychiatric hospital in London to a wedding gown fitting at Bergdorf Goodman; from a house in small town Ohio to a family reunion at a sweltering New Jersey pig roast. Framed by Isadora’s efforts to retell her grandmother’s journey--and understand her own--the novel is an evocative exploration of the stories we tell ourselves, and what we leave out.

Mary Norris

17th Annual Great Writers, Great Readings Series – Fall 2020
Thursday, October 8, at 6:30 p.m.

Virtual Event
For more information, please call 516-463-5669.

Mary Norris worked as a copy editor at The New Yorker for more than 30 years, an experience that formed the basis of her first book, Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Norton, 2015), a New York Times bestseller. It was followed by Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen (Norton, 2019), which Booklist described as “a delicious intersection of personal essays, etymology, and travel writing.” Norris has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times Literary Supplement. She also created a series of videos for The New Yorker called “Comma Queen.”