Quilt Stories

Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of a number of works of fiction, including The Girl in the Blue Beret, In Country, An Atomic Romance, and Nancy Culpepper. The groundbreaking Shiloh and Other Stories won the PEN Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN Faulkner Award. Her memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won two Southern Book Awards and numerous other prizes, including the O. Henry and the Pushcart. Former writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky, she lives in Kentucky.

Sharyn McCrumb lives and writes in the Virginia Blue Ridge less than a hundred miles from where her family settled in 1790 in the Smoky Mountains.

Marge Piercy has published seventeen novels, most recently Sex Wars, from William Morrow Paperbacks, and the republishing of two early novels, Dance the Eagle to Sleep and Vida from PM Press, with introductions by Piercy, and a new collection of short stories, The Cost of Lunch, Etc. She is the author of twenty poetry collections, most recently On The Way Out, Turn Off the Light from Knopf. She published a memoir, Sleeping with Cats and five nonfiction books. Her CD of feminist and other political poems is called Louder, we can't hear you (Yet!). Her work has been translated into twenty-three languages. She has given over 570 readings, speeches, and/or workshops here and abroad. Piercy has been active in feminist, left, and environmental causes since high school. She shares her home on Cape Cod with her beloved Ira Wood and three cats.

Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America’s most respected literary figures. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist. Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, she was raised in a deeply religious family and educated in a seminary school run by her elder sister. In her adult life, Stowe married biblical scholar and abolitionist Calvin Ellis Stowe, who would later go on to work as Harriet’s literary agent, and the two participated in the Underground Railroad by providing temporary refuge for escaped slaves travelling to the American North. Shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, Stowe published her most famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a stark and sympathetic depiction of the desperate lives of African American slaves. The book went on to see unprecedented sales, and informed American and European attitudes towards abolition. In the years leading up to her death, suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, Stowe is said to have begun re-writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, almost word-for-word, believing that she was writing the original manuscript once again. Stowe died in July 1, 1896 at the age of eighty-five.