Lydia Kiesling is an American author and literary critic. Her debut novel, The Golden State, was published in September 2018 by MCD Books, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. [1] From 2016 to 2019 she was the editor of the San Francisco-based literary magazine The Millions. [2]
The Golden State follows a new mother, Daphne, whose Turkish husband, ensnarled in visa complications, is unable to return to the US; overwhelmed by the demands of parenthood, Daphne takes leave from a bureaucratic office job at a large university to go on a road trip to rural Northern California with her daughter. [3] Literary critics have described the book as a subversion of traditional American road trip tropes in literary narrative, as well as a "journey in the visceral and material realities of motherhood" (Sarah Blackwood, The New Yorker). [4] [5] The book was long-listed for the 2018 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. [6] It also earned Kiesling acclaim from the National Book Foundation, which named her one of their "5 Under 35," a recognition for debut writers. [7] [8]
Mobility follows Elizabeth "Bunny" Glenn from her time as an American teenager living in Azerbaijan with her foreign service family during the collapse of the Soviet Union into the new millennium as she comes of age and develops a career in the oil industry in Texas. The novel addresses themes of "climate change, capitalism and personal accountability."
Keisling has stated that Oil! by Upton Sinclair was an influence for her novel. [9]
Kiesling received an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. [10] She taught English in Istanbul, Turkey soon after graduating. [11] She has studied Turkic languages and is an alumna of the Critical Language Scholarship Program. [12]
Prior to writing The Golden State, Kiesling directed outreach at UC Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies for 3 years, leaving in May 2016. [6] [12]
Kiesling's father is the former U.S. diplomat John Brady Kiesling. [11]
Isabel Angélica Allende Llona is a Chilean-American writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the genre magical realism, is known for novels such as The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author." In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Ayelet Waldman is an Israeli-American novelist and essayist. She has written seven mystery novels in the series The Mommy-Track Mysteries and four other novels. She has also written autobiographical essays about motherhood. Waldman spent three years working as a federal public defender and her fiction draws on her experience as a lawyer.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.
Sigrid Nunez is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant.
Jewelle Lydia Gomez is an American author, poet, critic and playwright. She lived in New York City for 22 years, working in public television, theater, as well as philanthropy, before relocating to the West Coast. Her writing—fiction, poetry, essays and cultural criticism—has appeared in a wide variety of outlets, both feminist and mainstream. Her work centers on women's experiences, particularly those of LGBTQ women of color. She has been interviewed for several documentaries focused on LGBT rights and culture.
Anne Teresa Enright is an Irish writer. The first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015–2018) and winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), she has published seven novels, many short stories, and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about the birth of her two children. Her essays on literary themes have appeared in the London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and she writes for the books pages of The Irish Times and The Guardian. Her fiction explores themes such as family, love, identity and motherhood.
Samantha Hunt is an American novelist, essayist and short-story writer.
Ellis Avery was an American writer. She won two Stonewall Book Awards, one in 2008 for her debut novel The Teahouse Fire and one in 2013 for her second novel The Last Nude. The Teahouse Fire also won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction and an Ohioana Library Fiction Award in 2007. She self-published her memoir, The Family Tooth, in 2015. Her final book, Tree of Cats, was independently published posthumously. An out lesbian, she is survived by her spouse, Sharon Marcus.
Claire Vaye Watkins is an American author and academic.
Ashley Little is a Canadian author of both adult and young adult literature.
Everything I Never Told You is the 2014 debut novel by Celeste Ng. The novel topped Amazon's Best Books of the Year list for 2014. The novel is about a mixed-race Chinese-American family whose middle daughter Lydia is found drowned in a nearby lake. Ng spent six years writing the novel, going through four different full drafts.
Eileen is a 2015 novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, published by Penguin Press. It is Moshfegh's first novel. It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for debut fiction and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel was adapted into a 2023 film.
Shawna Yang Ryan is a Taiwanese-American novelist, short story writer and creative writing professor, who has published the novels Water Ghosts (2009) and Green Island (2016) (Knopf). She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Vanessa Hua is an American journalist and writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of Deceit and Other Possibilities and A River of Stars (Ballantine) and the novel, Forbidden City. She is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, ZYZZYVA, Guernica, and other publications. She received a National Endowment for the Arts awards Literature Fellowship award in 2020.
The Mothers is a debut novel by Brit Bennett. The book follows Nadia, a young woman who left her Southern California hometown years ago after the suicide of her mother and is called back to attend to a family emergency. The Mothers, released on October 11, 2016 by Riverhead Books, received critical acclaim and was a New York Times bestseller. A film adaptation is being produced by Kerry Washington's production company Simpson Street.
The Testaments is a 2019 novel by Margaret Atwood. It is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). The novel is set 15 years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale. It is narrated by Aunt Lydia, a character from the previous novel; Agnes, a young woman living in Gilead; and Daisy, a young woman living in Canada.
The Farm is a 2019 novel by Filipino-American writer Joanne Ramos. The debut novel was published on May 7, 2019 by Random House. It is set in a fictional facility named Golden Oaks, also called "The Farm", where women serve as surrogates for wealthy clients. The novel switches between four perspectives of the women involved, including Jane Reyes, Evelyn "Ate" Arroyo, Reagan McCarthy, and Mae Yu.
K-Ming Chang is an American novelist and poet. She is the author of the novel Bestiary (2020). Gods of Want won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. In 2021, Bestiary was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Szilvia Molnar is an American writer whose first novel The Nursery was released in 2023.