Readings – Guest Authors

Ron Carlson’s most recent novel is The Signal from Viking.  His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harpers, The New Yorker, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O'Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and other anthologies.  Ron Carlson Writes a Story, his book on writing is taught widely.  He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Cohen Prize at Ploughshares, the McGinnis Award at the Iowa Review, the Aspen Literary Award, and his novel Five Skies was One Book Rhode Island in 2009.  Mr. Carlson is Director of the Graduate Program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine.  His book of poems, Room Service, was published by Red Hen in Spring 2012.

Ann Louise Bardach is the author of Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washingtonand Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. She is also the editor of The Prison Letters of Fidel Castro as well as Cuba: A Travelers Literary Companionand served on The Brookings Institution's Cuba Study Project.

She is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast/Newsweek and has written for The New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal’s magazine, The New Republic, Los Angeles Times and was a reporter for Vanity Fair for a decade.

She has appeared on 60 Minutes, the Today Show, Dateline, CNN, Nightline, The O’Reilly Factor, Charlie Rose, National Public Radio and PRI's Marketplace. She created and wrote the Global Buzz column for Newsweek International and the Interrogation column for Slate.


She won the PEN USA Award for Journalism in 1995 for her reporting in Vanity Fair on Mexican politics, and was a finalist in 1994 for her coverage of women in Islamic countries. Her book Cuba Confidential was a finalist for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism and the PEN USA Award for Best Nonfiction, and named one of Ten Best Books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times.

She was a finalist for the 2005 PEN USA award for Journalism for her groundbreaking story on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ties with the tabloids.

She started the International Journalism class at University of California at Santa Barbara and is on the board of UCSB's Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television and New Media and is also a Resident Scholar with the Orfalea Center at UCSB.

Gail Tsukiyama is the author of seven novels, including Women of the Silk and The Samurai's Garden. She has been the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence, and the Asia Pacific Leadership Award from the Center of the Pacific Rim and the Ricci Institute. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she has taught at San Francisco State University, University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College. Her new novel, A Hundred Flowers, was published by St. Martin's Press in August 2012.

John Pielmeier began his career with the play and movie Agnes of God and the television film Choices of the Heart. Most recently he has written and acted in the extremely successful television miniseries The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End, and written a stage adaptation The Exorcist. In between he has won the Humanitas Award (plus two nominations), five Writers’ Guild Award nominations, a Gemini nomination, an Edgar Award, the Camie Award, a Christopher Award, and his projects have won a Gemini Award and been nominated for the Emmy Award (three times) and the Golden Globe Award. He is married to writer Irene O’Garden. They live in Garrison, New York. If you want to know more, please visit his website at johnpielmeier.com.