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

Kaplan works one-on-one with writers of fiction and non-fiction at all levels of experience as coach, mentor, and developmental editor, and designs programs for those looking for a graduate-level course of extended study.  She runs writing retreats, most recently in Mexico, Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, as well as on-line writing workshops.  She has taught creative writing at Rhode Island School of Design, the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, the Newport MFA Program, and is on the faculty of Lesley University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing.

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

Hester Kaplan is the author of two story collections, The Edge of Marriage (University of Georgia Press, and Norton), which received The Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction; and Unravished (Ig Publishing); the novels The Tell (HarperCollins) and Kinship Theory (Little, Brown). Her stories and essays have appeared in Agni Review, Ploughshares, Story, Glimmer Train, Southwest Review, and Indiana Review, among other journals and publications.  Her work has been widely anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories, Creature Needs, Providence Noir, Beautiful Flesh, and others.  

Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two fellowships in literature from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, she was named Mark Twain Fellow for her new book, Twice Born (Catapult, 2025).  Her work has received the McGinnis Ritchie Award for Non-fiction, The Salamander Award for Fiction, among other awards and recognitions.

She is a co-founder of Write Rhode Island!, a state-wide high school writing competition, and Goat Hill, a literary production group hosting events such as conversations and panels with authors, agents, and editors, as well as offering workshops, seminars, and novel and memoir development courses.  

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.

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

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. Her memoir, The Mirror Box: A Doctor’s Story will be published by W.W. Norton & Co. on 3/23/27