Our Boston: Writers Celebrate the City They Love

Andrew Blauner is the founder of Blauner Books Literary Agency, which was named one of "The 15 Most Influential Sports Education Teams in America" by the Institute for International Sport. He is the Editor of: BROTHERS: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry; CENTRAL PARK: An Anthology; OUR BOSTON: Writers Celebrate the City They Love; and the forthcoming THE GOOD BOOK: Writers Reflect on the Bible. He is alsothe Co-Editor of FOR THE LOVE OF BASEBALL: A Celebration of the Game that Connects Us All. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN, and SABR, he is a graduate of Collegiate School, Brown University, and the Columbia University School of Business. For more information about COACH: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, https://www.facebook.com/COACHanthology https://twitter.com/COACHanthology.

Kevin Cullen is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written for the Boston Globe since 1985, and he was the first to raise questions about Whitey Bulger’s relationship with the FBI. A frequent commentator on NPR and the BBC, Cullen has won major journalism prizes, including the Goldsmith Prize, the George Polk Award, and the Selden Ring Award.

André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, Enigma Variations, and Find Me. He's the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.

Charles McGrath is a writer at large at The New York Times, and was formerly editor of The New York Times Book Review and deputy editor of The New Yorker. He is the coauthor of The Ultimate Golf Book and a frequent contributor to Golf Digest. McGrath lives in New Jersey.

Madeleine Blais was a reporter for the Miami Herald for years before joining the faculty of the School of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts. She is the author of In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, Uphill Walkers, and The Heart Is an Instrument, a collection of her journalism. Madeleine lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

George Howe Colt is the bestselling author of November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide and The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, which was a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. He lives with his family in Massachusetts.

Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles and may be reached at SusanOrlean.com and on Twitter @SusanOrlean.

David Michaelis is the author of two bestselling biographies, including N. C. Wyeth (available from Harper Perennial), which won the Ambassador Book Award for Biography and Autobiography, given by the English-Speaking Union of the United States. He lives in New York City.

Jabari Asim is an associate professor of writing at Emerson College and a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. He has written for the Washington Post and is the editor of the NCAAP magazine, The Crisis. He lives in Boston, with his wife and five children.

Lesley Visser is the most highly acclaimed female sportscaster of all time. She is the first and only woman in the Pro Football Hall of Fame; the only female sportscaster to have carried the Olympic Torch; the only woman to have presented the championship Lombardi Trophy at the Super Bowl; and the first woman on the network broadcasts of the Final Four, Super Bowl, and NBA finals. She was voted the Outstanding Female Sportscaster of all Time by the National Sportscasters of America, and was also elected to the Sportswriters Hall of Fame for her work at the Boston Globe, national magazines, and CBS.com. Visser was the first and only woman to win the Billie Jean King “Outstanding Journalist” award, and has been honored as the first woman Lombardi Fellow, named a Sports Business Journal “Champion,” and also elected to the Sports Museum of Boston. A graduate of Boston College, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2007, she has been on the board of the V Foundation for Cancer Research for more than twenty years, while also serving on the board of NYU’s “Sports and Society.” Visser has mentored young women for decades, while speaking at colleges and businesses around the world. A sportscaster at CBS for more than twenty-five years, she also spent nearly ten at ABC Sports, where she became the first woman on Monday Night Football while also covering the World Series, World Figure Skating, World Skiing Championships, and Triple Crown. She has been voted one of the “Women We Love” by Esquire magazine and one of “Five Ideal Dinner Guests” by GQ. Most recently, she was honored by the Muhammad Ali Center as a “Daughter of Greatness,” in recognition of her leadership and dedication to activism and pursuit of justice. She and her husband, Bob Kanuth, a former captain of Harvard Basketball, live in Bay Harbor Islands, Florida.

Hugh Delehanty is a former editor for Sports Illustrated and People. He is also the co-author, along with Phil Jackson, of the bestselling memoir Sacred Hoops.

George Plimpton (1927-2003) was the bestselling author and editor of nearly thirty books, as well as the cofounder, publisher, and editor of the Paris Review. He wrote regularly for such magazines as Sports Illustrated and Esquire, and he appeared numerous times in films and on television.

Leslie Epstein, whose father and uncle, Philip G. and Julius J. Epstein, wrote Arsenic and Old Lace, Casablanca, and many other classics of the golden era of films, is the author of eight works of fiction, including Pandaemonium and Pinto and Sons. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and has for many years directed the Creative Writing Program at Boston University.

Nell Scovell is a television writer, producer, and director, She collaborated with Sheryl Sandberg on the #1 New York Times bestseller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. She is the creator of the television series Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and her TV writing credits include The Simpsons, Coach, Monk, Murphy Brown, Charmed, and NCIS. She has directed two movies for cable television and an episode of Awkward. She has contributed to SPY magazine, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The New York Times. She and her husband Colin Summers have two college-age sons. Despite Blue Oyster Cult’s well-reasoned arguments, she still fears the reaper.

Dennis Lehane is the author of thirteen novels—including the New York Times bestsellers Live by Night; Moonlight Mile; Gone, Baby, Gone; Mystic River; Shutter Island; and The Given Day—as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He grew up in Boston, MA and now lives in California with his family.

James Atlas has been an editor for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times Magazine and a staff writer for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He is the founder of Atlas Books and the general editor of the Eminent Lives series. His other books include Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, Bellow: A Biography, and a novel, The Great Pretender. He lives with his wife and two children in New York City.

Leigh Montville is a former columnist at the Boston Globe and former senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller The Big Bam.

Tova Mirvis is the author of The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in various anthologies and newspapers, including the New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and Poets and Writers, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her three children.

Pagan Kennedy, a former innovation columnist for the New York Times Magazine, is the author of the New York Times Notable Book Black Livingstone, the Barnes & Noble Discover pick Spinsters, and other books. Pagan's work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Dwell, the Nation, and elsewhere. Her honors include a MIT Knight Science Journalism fellowship, a Smithsonian fellowship, a Massachusetts Book Prize honor in nonfiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Scott Stossel is the editor of the Atlantic and the author of Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver. His articles and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He lives with his family in Washington, DC.

Robert Pinsky was born on October 20, 1940 in Long Branch, New Jersey. He received a B.A. from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and earned both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow in creative writing, and studied under the poet and critic Yvor Winters.He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Gulf Music: Poems; Jersey Rain (2000); The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996), which received the 1997 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee; The Want Bone (1990); History of My Heart (1984); An Explanation of America (1980); and Sadness and Happiness (1975). He is also the author of several prose titles, including The Life of David; Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002); The Sounds of Poetry (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Poetry and the World (1988); and The Situation of Poetry (1977). In 1985 he also released a computerized novel, Mindwheel.Pinsky has published two acclaimed works of traslation: The Inferno of Dante (1994), which was a Book-of-the-Month-Club Editor's Choice, and received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award ; and The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz (with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass ).About his work, the poet Louise Glück has said, "Robert Pinsky has what I think Shakespeare must have had: dexterity combined with worldliness, the magician's dazzling quickness fused with subtle intelligence, a taste for tasks and assignments to which he devises ingenious solutions."From 1997 to 2000, he served as the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. During that time, he founded the Favorite Poem Project, a program dedicated to celebrating, documenting and encouraging poetry's role in Americans' lives.In 1999, he co-edited Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology with Maggie Dietz. Other anthologies he has edited include An Invitation to Poetry (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004); Poems to Read (2002); and Handbook of Heartbreak (1998).His honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, both the William Carlos Williams Award and the Shelley Memorial prize from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He is currently poetry editor of the weekly Internet magazine Slate.Pinsky has taught at both Wellesley College and the University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Bill Littlefield has hosted National Public Radio’s weekly sports magazine, “Only A Game,” since 1993 and has written commentaries for NPR and Boston’s WBUR-FM for over thirty years. He is the author of seven books, including the novels Prospect and The Circus in the Woods and the recent collection of sports verse Take Me Out. In 2001 he met W. C. Heinz and they became friends, for which he has been grateful ever since.

Neil Swidey is the author of The Assist, a Boston Globe bestseller that was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, and coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. A staff writer for the Boston Globe Magazine, he has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award and has twice won the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. He teaches at Tufts University and lives outside Boston with his wife and three daughters.

Jessica Shattuck is the New York Times bestselling author of The Women in the Castle, The Hazards of Good Breeding, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, and Wired, among other publications.

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He is the author of fifty-odd previous books, including twenty novels and numerous collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.

Pico Iyer is the acclaimed and bestselling author of more than a dozen books, translated into twenty-three languages. His journalism has appeared in Time, the New York Times, New York Review of Books, the London Financial Times, and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide. His TED talks have been viewed over eleven million times. He divides his time between Japan and a Benedictine hermitage in California.

A veteran of stage and screen, Peter Berkrot's career spans four decades. Highlights include feature roles in Caddyshack and Showtime's Brotherhood, and appearances on America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries. His voice can be heard on television, radio, video games, documentaries, and industrials. He is a prominent acting coach and a regular contributor to the award-winning news program Frontline produced by WGBH in Boston. Peter served as director of narration for the Emmy-nominated The Truth About Cancer. Peter has recorded over 170 audiobooks, over 100 for children. He has been nominated for an Audie Award and has received a number of AudioFile Earphones Awards and starred reviews. His favorite titles include Toby and the Secrets of the Tree by Timotee de Fombelle, Unholy Night by Seth Grahame-Smith, The Accident by Linwood Barclay, and the Last Policeman trilogy by Ben H. Winters.

Johnny Heller is an award-winning narrator and one of the most sought-after voiceover coaches in the nation. An ALA Odyssey Award winner, AudioFile Golden Voice, and a Grammy nominee, he has narrated over 1,000 titles in almost every genre. A multiple recipient of Booklist and Publishers Weekly Starred Reviews, Publishers Weekly Listen Up Awards, and AudioFile Magazine Best Voice of the Year recognitions, he is regularly nominated for Earphones and Audies and is a multi-award winner of both.

Malcolm Hillgartner has narrated over 175 audiobooks. He was named an AudioFile Best Voice of 2013. His work ranges from children's titles such as On the Blue Comet (AudioFile Best of 2011, Earphones), and Neal Stevenson's sci-fi epic REAMDE (Audible.com Best of 2011) to the biographies Kissinger (AudioFile Best of 2013, Earphones) and Cheever (AudioFile Best of 2009, Earphones). He is also an accomplished actor, writer, and musician. With his wife and partner, Jahnna Beecham, he has written over 130 books for teens and young readers, as well as the musicals Chaps! and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Musical, which have been produced in the U.S. and Canada.

Jim Meskimen is an American comedian and actor, best known for his work on Whose Line Is It Anyway? and his extensive voice acting and television work. Books he has narrated include the Calendar Mysteries series by Ron Roy, The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin, by Josh Berk, and The Deleted E-Mails of Hillary Clinton by John Moe.

Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto... with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.

Bernadette Dunne has been honored to narrate the work of some of the finest fiction and nonfiction writers of our time, including Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sandra Day O'Connor. The winner of more than a dozen Earphones Awards and a three-time Audie Award nominee, she has voiced countless bestsellers, including Memoirs of a Geisha, The Devil Wears Prada, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She studied at The Royal National Theater and lives in New York.

Bronson Pinchot is an experienced narrator and actor who has appeared in multiple films and television shows. His film and television credits include Risky Business, Beverly Hills Cop, True Romance, and Perfect Strangers. A lover of Greek Revival architecture and soft shell crab, he currently resides in Manhattan.

Carrington MacDuffie is a recording artist, writer, and voice actor who has narrated over 100 audiobooks and received numerous AudioFile Earphones awards and six Audie finalists. Her original audiobook of poetry and music, Many Things Invisible, was nominated for an Audie in two categories.

Susan Boyce is an award-winning audiobook narrator. She has recorded over ninety audiobooks in a variety of categories, and her talents have been put to work by industry giants such as Amica, Hasbro, and Mattel. She earned a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Rhode Island in 1979 and has worked on-stage at Trinity Repertory Theatre, Worcester Foothills Theatre, The Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, and every major Ragtime and Traditional Jazz Festival in the United States.

Kevin Kenerly, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, earned a BA at Olivet College. A longtime member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, he has acted in more than twenty seasons, playing dozens of roles.

Meredith Mitchell is an actress who has performed in such films as Mona Lisa Smile and The Reunion, on stage with Shakespeare & Company and the New Repertory Theatre, and on television on Good Morning America. She received her BA in psychology from Emory University and her MFA in acting from Brandeis University.

Ralph Lister is an experienced actor and voice artist who trained at LAMDA. He spent fifteen years in mainstage theatre in London, Madrid, Hong Kong, and Edinburgh before moving to America, where he focuses on film, television, and audiobook narration.