John Freeman at Harvard Book Store

Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman’s novels include Sam (a Read With Jenna Book Club selection), The Chalk Artist (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award), Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.  Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study.  Her new novel Isola will be published in February 2025.

Claire Messud

Claire Messud’s bestselling novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs (2013); and The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a book of novellas, The Hunters (2001), and a memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020). Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times, among other publications. She was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2020. Her new novel, This Strange Eventful History, will be published by W.W. Norton in May, 2024.

Hitomi Yoshio

Hitomi Yoshio is the translator of Natsuko Imamura’s This Is Amiko, Do You Copy? (2023) and co-translator of Mieko Kawakami’s two forthcoming short story collections, Ashes of Spring and Dreams of Love, Etc. She received her PhD from Columbia University, and is Associate Professor of Global Japanese Studies at Waseda University in Japan. During 2022–2024, she is a visiting scholar at Harvard University and lives with her family in Brookline, Massachusetts.

John Freeman

John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s. The author and editor of eleven books, he lives in New York City, where he is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. His latest book is the poetry collection, Wind, Trees. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Orion, and Zyzzyva. Each month he hosts Atla magazine's California Book Club, an online discussion of a new Golden State classic.

Photo Credit: Copper Canyon

Joshua Bennett

Poet, performer, and scholar Joshua Bennett is the author of two collections of poetry, Owed and The Sobbing School, as well as a book of criticism, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf. He received his PhD in English from Princeton University, and is currently Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. His writing has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2021, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award in Poetry and Nonfiction. He lives in Boston.