By Rosaleen Bertolino

 

Please join us for Prose Café’s inaugural event of 2021, Thurs, Jan 7, live via Zoom, featuring three remarkable novelists. We’ll conclude our evening with a Q&A session between the authors and our audience.

 

Gerard Helferich, who divides his time between Jackson, Mississippi and San Miguel de Allende, is the author of five critically acclaimed, best selling works of nonfiction: Humboldt’s Cosmos, High Cotton, Stone of Kings, Theodore Roosevelt and the Assassin, and An Unlikely Trust. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, he publishes reviews in the Wall Street Journal. For 18 years he has been on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and he has taught numerous courses and workshops at the San Miguel Writers Conference. Before turning to writing, he worked for 25 years as an editor and publisher at companies such as Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and John Wiley & Sons. Helferich will be reading from his forthcoming historical detective novel, featuring blackmail, murder, and Theodore Roosevelt’s time as New York’s police commissioner. The novel, his first foray into fiction, is set in 1896, during a divisive presidential election campaign. 

 

The award-winning writer Susan Stinson will read from her novel Martha Moody, which was re-issued in December by Small Beer Press, 25 years after it was first published. Reviewers have called this novel “a comic masterpiece” and “so bloody good it made me want to run naked through a meadow.” Stinson is also the author of the novels Spider in a Tree, Venus of Chalk (a Lambda Literary Award finalist), Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, and Belly Songs, a collection of poetry and lyric essays. She has received the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Award from Lambda Literary Foundation. Born in Texas and raised in Colorado, she now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. She has taught at Amherst College, offers writing coaching and editorial services, and is often found on Twitter. 

 

Last, but definitely not least, we are thrilled to present Nicolás Medina Mora. Based in Mexico City, he is a writer and editor at Revista Nexos. Medina Mora has an MFA from the University of Iowa and his work in English has appeared in n+1, The Nation, and The New York Times. He is currently putting the finishing touches on his first novel, América del Norte, from which he will read a selection.

 

The San Miguel Prose Café is an all-volunteer organization presenting local and visiting writers, both established and emerging. All events are free, but during our current season online, advanced registration is required. Go to www.sanmiguelliterarysala.org to sign-up. Those of you tuning in from out of town, please remember the event is 5-6pm.