After you enjoy hot chocolate, tea, and treats at Carybokaflod, join us for our Literary Café where host Marjan Kamali will be in conversation with novelists Adrienne Brodeur and Nancy Crochiere to explore how they work secrets, simmering resentments, and family trauma and forgiveness into their brilliant books.

This is a hybrid program - you can attend in person or watch via Zoom. If you are attending via Zoom, please register to receive the Zoom link.

About our Authors:

Marjan Kamali is the award-winning author of The Stationery Shop (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), a national bestseller, and Together Tea (EccoBooks/HarperCollins), a Massachusetts Book Award finalist. She is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. Kamali’s novels are published in translation in more than 20 languages and The Stationery Shop was awarded the Prix Attitude in France. Her essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Literary Hub, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. The Stationery Shop is being adapted into a TV series at HBO and Together Tea was adapted for the stage.

Kamali holds a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, an MBA from Columbia University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from New York University. Born in Turkey to Iranian parents, Kamali spent her childhood in Turkey, Iran, Germany, Kenya, and the U.S.  She currently teaches creative writing at GrubStreet and lives in the Boston area with her family.

Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the novel Little Monsters and the memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover and Me.  She has spent the past two decades of her professional life in the literary world, discovering voices, cultivating talent, and working to amplify underrepresented writers. Her publishing career began with founding the fiction magazine, Zoetrope: All-Story, with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, where she served as editor-in-chief from 1996-2002. The magazine has won the prestigious National Magazine Award for best fiction four times. In 2005, she became an editor at Harcourt (later, HMH Books), where she acquired and edited literary fiction and memoir. Adrienne left publishing in 2013 to become Creative Director — and later Executive Director — of Aspen Words, a literary arts nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. In 2017, she launched the Aspen Words Literary Prize, a $35,000 annual award for an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.

Adrienne splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children. 

Nancy Crochiere wrote a humor column about family life for Massachusetts newspapers for thirteen years. Her collection of those columns, titled The Mother Load, was a finalist for Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year in humor and the Independent Publishers of New England 2014 Book Award. A graduate of Middlebury College, she earned a master’s degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Minnesota, is an alumna of GrubStreet’s Novel Incubator program, and worked as a development editor for various educational publishers. Her essays have appeared in The Boston Globe, Writer’s Digest, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog. She began her fiction career when her daughters were young by penning creative notes to excuse their tardiness at school. With her girls now grown, she lives north of Boston with her husband, a lawyer and marathoner, and a few house plants that could use more attention. Graceland is her first novel.

Sponsored by the Cary Library Foundation.