NBCC board member Geeta Sharma-Jensen on “Home,” in which NBCC award winner Marilynne Robinson returns to “Gilead.” (Heads up: Marilynne Robinson, NBCC fiction award winner Bharati Mukherjee, and NBCC fiction finalist Aleksandar Hemon will be giving a reading sponsored by the NBCC and the Chicago Tribune at the AWP conference in Chicago, February 13, 2009, 3 pm, in the Grand Ballroom of the Chicago Hilton. All conference participants welcome, and the NBCC will be recruiting student members.)
NBCC board member Rigoberto Gonzalez has been named the Frost Place Resident Poet for summer 2008.
NBCC member Rayyan Al Shawaf is first out of the gate with a review of Louis de Bernieres’s “A Partisan’s Daughter,” in the San Antonio Express News.
NBCC member Michael O’Donnell deciphers the dedications in Lawrence Lessig’s “Remix” in the San Francisco Chronicle. (One is to Jack Valenti.)
Speaking of San Francisco, news from our West Coast members: Book Group Expo, the weekend of October 25-26 in San Jose, has a long lineup, including short story author and former AWP president Catherine Brady, one of the hosts of the NBCC finalists award announcement at City Lights in San Francisco in January of this year (ditto Jane Ganahl, Susanne Pari); as well as NBCC member, novelist, critic (and NBCC SF panelist) Sylvia Brownrigg; NBCC SF panelist James Houston, Michelle Richmond, NBCC member Victoria Zakheim, not to mention novelists Terry McMillan, Ron Hanson, Elizabeth Strout, and others.