2026 Featured Authors and Participants
Meet the authors and participants who will share their stories and insights at Adelphi's 2026 Writers & Readers Festival.
Photo credit: @AlyssaPeek
Alice Hoffman ’73
Alice Hoffman is the author of the Practical Magic novels, which will come to movie screens for a second time this September in the highly anticipated film Practical Magic 2. Her more than 30 works of fiction include When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary, The World That We Knew, The Marriage of Opposites, The Red Garden, The Museum of Extraordinary Things, The Dovekeepers, Here on Earth (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), and Practical Magic, Magic Lessons, The Rules of Magic (a selection of Reese’s Book Club), and The Book of Magic. Her most recent book is the anthology The Best Dog in the World: Essays on Love, a collection of pieces by 14 authors celebrating the life-changing bond they’ve experienced with their dogs, and her next novel, The Witches of Cambridge, will be published in August. A Broadway production of Practical Magic, featuring the music of Norah Jones and Gregg Wattenberg, is in the works. She lives near Boston, Massachusetts.
Photo Credit: Tim Llewellyn
Jodi Picoult
Jodi Picoult is the No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of 30 novels, including By Any Other Name, Mad Honey (co-authored with Jennifer Finney Boylan), Wish You Were Here, The Book of Two Ways, A Spark of Light, Small Great Things, Leaving Time and My Sister’s Keeper, and, with her daughter Samantha van Leer, two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page. Her work is celebrated not only for its emotional depth and meticulous research but also for tackling complex moral and ethical issues with nuance and compassion. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband.
Photo Credit: Justice Apple
Susan Lucci
Susan Lucci is an Emmy Award-winning actress and New York Times bestselling author, entrepreneur and advocate for women’s heart health. The most famous actress in the history of daytime television, she is known to generations of fans for her vivid portrayal of Erica Kane on ABC-TV’s All My Children. She later starred on Broadway in Annie Get Your Gun and in the television dramas Devious Maids and Deadly Affairs. Her new memoir, La Lucci, an instant New York Times bestseller, is a follow-up to her 2011 autobiography, All My Life, which reached No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Patrik Henry Bass
Patrik Henry Bass is executive editor at Amistad Books, an imprint at Harper Collins Publishers dedicated to publishing Black voices and honoring the legacy of Black literature. For nearly two decades, Bass was books editor at Essence Magazine, where he worked with a wide range of writers including Pulitzer Prize winners Isabel Wilkerson, Robin Givhan, Rita Dove, and Leonard Pitts, Jr., as well as Maya Angelou, Colin Powell, Terry McMillan, Edwidge Danticat, Pearl Cleage, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Sonia Sanchez. He is the author of Like A Mighty Stream: The March on Washington, August 28, 1963 , The Zero Degree Zombie Zone, and co-author of In Our Own Image. Bass has written for and edited numerous publications including The New York Times, Washington Post and The Paris Review. He has lectured widely on African-American culture and as an adjunct professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.
Robin Boyle-Laisure, JD
Robin Boyle-Laisure is professor at St. John’s University School of Law, New York. She serves as a member of the board of directors of the International Cultic Studies Association and for nearly 30 years has presented at conferences domestically and internationally on topics concerning human trafficking and cults. Taken No More: Protect Your Children Against Traffickers and Cults was published in 2025, and she is also the author of three academic books on the law. A graduate of Fordham University School of Law and Vassar College, Professor Boyle-Laisure provides pro bono legal services to nonprofit organizations and to underrepresented individuals, and lives on Long Island with her husband, Paul Skip Laisure, a criminal defense attorney representing indigent clients on appeal.
Craig Carson, PhD
Craig Carson, PhD, is the associate dean of the Adelphi University Honors College and a former associate professor of English at the University. In addition to numerous articles, book chapters and translations, Dr. Carson is the author of the book The Aesthetics of Democracy: Eighteenth-Century Literature and Political Economy. His teaching and research interests include literary theory, aesthetics, political theory and ecocriticism.
Photo Credit: Shiva Muthiah
Roohi Choudhry
Roohi Choudhry was born in Pakistan, grew up in southern Africa, and now calls Brooklyn her home. Her debut novel, Outside Women, is a century-spanning story of feminist resistance, radical kinship and migrant solidarity set in South Africa, Pakistan and New York City, and was described as “riveting … an incisive story of how change happens” by Publishers Weekly. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Adi Magazine, Longreads, Poets & Writers, and The Kenyon Review. She has a background in criminal justice reform, public health and international development and now works as a cultural organizer and teaching artist.
Photo Credit: Heather Raub
Fiona Davis
Fiona Davis is a New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction set in iconic New York City buildings, including The Stolen Queen, The Magnolia Palace (a Book of the Month pick) and The Lions of Fifth Avenue (a Good Morning America book club pick). She is also the author of the first-ever American Girl novel, Samantha: The Next Chapter, which is written for adult readers and will be published in October 2026. She lives in New York City and is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Louise Geddes, PhD
Louise Geddes is a professor of English at Adelphi as well as associate dean for student success initiatives in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Appropriating Shakespeare: A Cultural History of Pyramus and Thisbe and The Shakespeare Multiverse: Fandom as Literary Praxis, and the general editor of Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare Appropriation.
Photo credit: Elan Abitbol
Marcos Gonsalez, PhD
Dr. Marcos Gonsalez is the author of Pedro’s Theory: Reimagining the Promised Land; Revolting Indolence: The Politics of Slacking, Lounging, and Daydreaming in Queer and Trans Latinx Culture; and In Theory, Darling: Searching for José Esteban Muñoz and the Queer Imagination, an essay collection on queer theory and the queer Latinx theorist José Esteban Muñoz. His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation, and Pedro’s Theory was longlisted for the 2021 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared on Literary Hub and in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Inside Higher Ed, Bomb Magazine, Ploughshares, Post45, Catapult Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. He lives in New York City and is an assistant professor of English at Adelphi University.
Photo Credit: Matthew Brookshire
Luis Jaramillo
Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Witches of El Paso. He is also the author of the award-winning short story collection The Doctor’s Wife. His writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Bomb Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. His honors include fellowships from Aspen Words, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the New York Institute for the Humanities. He is an associate professor of creative writing and chair of fiction at The New School. He received an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing from The New School.
Photo credit: Sarah Shatz
Julie Klam
After attending the New York University Tisch School of the Arts and interning at Late Night with David Letterman, Julie Klam went on to write for such publications as O, The Oprah Magazine; Rolling Stone; Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour, and for the VH1 television show Pop-Up Video, where she earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Special Class Writing. She is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including Please Excuse My Daughter, You Had Me at Woof and The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Her next book, Other People’s Dogs, will be out in 2027, and she currently has a Substack platform of the same name. When not writing, Klam is an intake coordinator for Northeast Boston Terrier Rescue, a trans rights activist and a doom scroller. She lives in New York City with her family and a variety of dogs.
Photo Credit: Sabrina Lantos
Jessica Knoll
Jessica Knoll is the New York Times bestselling author of Bright Young Women, The Favorite Sister, Helpless, and Luckiest Girl Alive— which was made into a major motion picture from Netflix starring Mila Kunis. She has been a senior editor at Cosmopolitan and the articles editor at Self. She lives in New York City with her husband, daughter and bulldog.
Photo credit: Scott M. Lacey
Ann Leary
Ann Leary is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Foundling, The Children, The Good House and Outtakes From a Marriage; the memoir An Innocent, A Broad; and the essay collection I’ve Tried Being Nice. She has written for numerous publications, including Ploughshares, NPR, Real Simple and The New York Times. The Good House, adapted as a motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Kevin Kline, was released in 2022. She and her husband, Denis Leary, live in New York.
Patricia Lespinasse, PhD
Patricia G. Lespinasse, PhD, is an associate professor of African American literature in the African, Black, and Caribbean Studies department at Adelphi. She is the author of The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature and the co-director of the film Proud Blood, a documentary examining the United States Food and Drug Administration’s ban on blood donations from Haitians in the 1990s. Dr. Lespinasse teaches courses in Caribbean literature, African American studies, race and gender in film, and blues and jazz literature.
Emily Lee Luan
Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回/Return, a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Poetry and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2021, American Poetry Review, Lithub, and elsewhere. A visiting professor in Adelphi’s MFA in Creative Writing program, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Ed Mabrey
Ed Mabrey is an NAACP Image Award nominee, Cave Canem fellow, Obsidian Fellow and The Watering Hole graduate fellow. Mabrey is a Pushcart Prize nominee and was commissioned to craft a speech encompassing the Freedom Award recipients for 2017–2021 on behalf of the National Civil Rights Museum. He is in the second year of study for his MFA at Adelphi University.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Ed Park
Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His debut story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, was published in July 2025 and is longlisted for the 2026 PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction. His fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney’s and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice, and has worked in newspapers and book publishing. In 2025, he received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space. His memoir, Three Tenses, is forthcoming in summer 2026, followed in the fall by The Repairer of Reputations, a work of weird horror bound in a special edition with the 1895 Robert W. Chambers classic of the same title.
Photo Credit: Jeanine Boubli
Alyson Richman
Alyson Richman is the USA Today and No. 1 international bestselling author of several historical novels, including The Missing Pages, The Time Keepers and The Lost Wife. She graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in art history and Japanese studies. Richman is an accomplished painter, and her books combine her deep love of art and historical research. Her novels have been published in more than 25 languages and have reached the bestseller lists both in the United States and abroad.
Photo courtesy of the author
Michael Rossi, PhD
Michael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Chicago and the author of The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America. He has written for the London Review of Books, Nature, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cabinet, among other publications. At the University of Chicago, Dr. Rossi is an associate professor in the Department of History, a faculty member on the Committee on Historical and Conceptual Studies of Science, and the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, and New York.
Photo credit: Tiffany Shelton
Marysue Rucci
Marysue Rucci is publisher and vice president of Scribner Books, the oldest imprint of Simon & Schuster. The former vice president, editor-in-chief and publisher of her own imprint at Simon & Schuster, Marysue Rucci Books, she acquires literary fiction, suspense fiction and book club fiction, as well as memoir and narrative nonfiction. Over the years, she has worked with a wide range of critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling authors, including Mona Awad, Bobbi Brown, Chris Cleave, Alice Elliott Dark, Laura Dave, Alice Hoffman, Jessica Knoll, Wally Lamb, Megan Miranda, Helen Phillips, Shonda Rhimes, Sarah Ruhl, Matthew Thomas, Rebecca Traister and Paul Yoon.
Photo Courtesy of Puja Shah
Puja Shah ’03
Dr. Puja Shah is the award-winning author of For My Sister, a novel rooted in her deep commitment to the safety and dignity of girls and women. A public health dentist, certified yoga and meditation instructor and current Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing student at Adelphi University, she lives and works at the intersection of science, story and spirit. Dr. Shah believes that storytelling is what connects us to one another. As a mother, she writes to imagine a more compassionate world.
Photo credit: Shari Diamond
Joan Silber
Joan Silber is the author of 10 works of fiction, the most recent of which is Mercy. Secrets of Happiness was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction of the Year. Her novel Improvement won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She also received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Fools was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Size of the World was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times fiction prize, and Ideas of Heaven was a finalist for the National Book Award and The Story Prize. She is also the author of The Art of Time in Fiction. She lives in New York and taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Photograph courtesy of Darcey Steinke
Darcey Steinke
Darcey Steinke is the author most recently of the memoir This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith. Her other books include the memoirs Flash Count Diary and Easter Everywhere and five novels: Sister Golden Hair, Milk, Jesus Saves, Suicide Blonde and Up Through the Water. Her books have been translated into 10 languages, and many have been New York Times Notable Books. Her nonfiction has appeared widely and she often writes about art. Her web story “Blindspot” was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been a Henry Hoyns Fellow, a Stegner Fellow, writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, and on the longlist for the Independent Book Award and the French Arles Author Prize. She has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, New York University, Princeton University and The American University of Paris. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.
René Steinke
René Steinke is the author of the novel, Friendswood, which was named one of National Public Radio’s Great Reads and an Amazon Book-of-the-Month. Darin Strauss called it “a large-hearted, big-brained book.” Steinke is the recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Her second novel, Holy Skirts, a fictionalized biography of Dada artist and poet the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her first novel is The Fires. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Salon.com, 4Columns, Bookforum and in anthologies. She is a professor of English and director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Adelphi University.
Photo credit: @TimStephenson
Adriana Trigiani
Adriana Trigiani is the New York Times bestselling author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction. She is also an award-winning playwright, television writer and producer, filmmaker, and host of the hit podcast You Are What You Read, where she interviews luminaries of our time. She was named Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia by President Sergio Mattarella of Italy. She grew up in the mountains of southwest Virginia, where she co-founded The Origin Project, a year-round, in-school writing program serving K–12 students across the state. Trigiani is honored to serve on the New York State Council on the Arts. She lives in Greenwich Village in New York City with her family.
Photo Credit: Shawn Miller
Jennifer Ashley Tepper
Jennifer Ashley Tepper is a leading theater historian, producer and author of the four-volume series The Untold Stories of Broadway and Women Writing Musicals: The Legacy That the History Books Left Out. As creative and programming director of the cabaret 54 Below, she conducted research that led to the creation of The Jonathan Larson Project, a show featuring songs from the composer’s never-produced musicals. She was also a consultant for the film version of Larson’s tick, tick… BOOM!
Photo Credit: Michael Kushner
Tim Weil
Tim Weil has served as music director, composer, arranger and orchestrator for more than 100 productions on Broadway and around the country and the world, and was the original music director of Jonathan Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, Rent.
Photo credit: @AdrianneMathiowetz
Laura Zigman
Laura Zigman is the author of seven novels, including the soon-to-be published The Author Weekend, Small World (a New York Times Group Text pick and New York Times Editor’s Choice), Separation Anxiety (optioned by Julianne Nicholson and the Mare of Easttown production company Wiip for a limited television series), and Animal Husbandry (made into the Fox 2000 movie Someone Like You, starring Hugh Jackman and Ashley Judd,and directed by Tony Goldwyn). She has ghostwritten/collaborated on several works of nonfiction, including Eddie Izzard’s New York Times bestseller Believe Me, has been a contributor to The New York Times and other publications, and was the recipient of a Yaddo residency. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she helps clients via Zoom, phone, and sometimes in person with their writing as Zigman Freud, Writing Therapist.
Festival Coordinator
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Nexus Building 210