ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The son of Italian immigrants, Christopher’s work often centers the Italian, Italian-American, and queer experience. He was educated at Swarthmore College, received his Masters in English Literature from Tufts University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Boston University. A native of Wilmington, DE, he now lives in Boston and Provincetown, MA, where he has recently completed his fifth novel, Last Seen, with the support of a 2024 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. At some point, he’ll get back to his new novel-in-progress, tentatively titled Mammismo.

Last Seen was published on February 17th, 2026 by Viking Penguin.

For more information, please visit https://christophercastellani.com/

Christopher Castellani is the author of five books, most recently the novel Leading Men, for which he received Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Leading Men was published by Viking Penguin, and is currently being adapted for film by Peter Spears (Oscar-winning producer of Nomadland) and Searchlight Pictures. The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, a collection of essays on point of view in fiction, was published in 2016 by Graywolf Press, and is taught in many creative writing workshops. His first novel, A Kiss from Maddalena (Algonquin, 2003) won the Massachusetts Book Award; its follow-up, The Saint of Lost Things (Algonquin, 2005), was a BookSense (IndieBound) Notable Book; the final novel in the trilogy, All This Talk of Love (Algonquin, 2013), was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Literary Award.

Christopher is currently the Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, on the faculty and academic board of the Warren Wilson MFA program, and the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Since 2019, he has chaired the Writing Panel at YoungArts, aka the National Foundation for the Advancement of Artists. For nearly twenty years, Christopher was in executive leadership at GrubStreet, where he founded the Muse and the Marketplace national literary conference and led the development of numerous artistic programs for adults, teens, and seniors. In 2015, he was awarded the Barnes and Noble/Poets & Writers “Writer for Writers” Award in recognition of his contributions to the literary community and his generosity toward fellow writers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Megan Marshall teaches nonfiction writing and archival research in the MFA creative writing program at Emerson College where she was named the first Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor.  She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, midway between Boston and Concord, locations that figure prominently in her subjects’ lives. She is the proud grandmother of five young readers to whom she has dedicated her most recent book, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart.  

For more information, please visit https://meganmarshallauthor.com/

Hester Kaplan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Suzanne Koven, longtime host of the CFA Breakfast with the Authors, was born and raised in New York City. After her residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and has practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for over 30 years.

Suzanne Koven received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The New Yorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. Her monthly column “In Practice” appeared in the Boston Globe and won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association in 2012. Her interview column, “The Big Idea,” appears at The Rumpus. Suzanne conducts workshops, moderates panel discussions, and speaks to a variety of audiences about literature and medicine, narrative and storytelling in medicine, women’s health, mental healthcare, and primary care and co-directs the Media and Medicine Certificate Program at Harvard Medical School. Suzanne’s essay collection, Letter to a Young Female Physician, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2021.