Virtual Event: George Howe Colt, Paul Elie, Megan Marshall, Michelle Nijhuis, and Stacey Vanek Smith

Andrew Blauner

Andrew Blauner is a literary agent and the editor of seven previous anthologies, including Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, The Peanuts Papers: Writers and Cartoonists on Charlie Brown, Snoopy & the Gang, and the Meaning of Life, and In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs.

George Howe Colt

George Howe Colt has written four books, including The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, which was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award in nonfiction. He wrote about John Thoreau’s death and its effect on his younger brother, Henry, in Brothers, winner of the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction. He has taught at Smith College and was for many years a staff writer at Life magazine. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife, Anne Fadiman.

Photo Credit: Anne Fadiman

Megan Marshall

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, The Peabody Sisters, and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast.  In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, her work has been awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction (twice) and the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization to a writer who has advanced the art and craft of biography. A past president of the Society of American Historians, Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson Professor at Emerson College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program.  Her new book of essays, After Lives: A Biographer’s Memoir, will be published in February 2025.

Photo Credit: Sarah Putnam

Michelle Nijhuis

Michelle Nijhuis, a project editor for the Atlantic and a long- time contributing editor for High Country News, is the author of Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction. After fifteen years of the electrical grid in rural Colorado, she and her family now live in southwestern Washington.

Photo Credit: Darcy Hunter

Paul Elie

Paul Elie is a senior fellow in Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Afairs, and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is the author of two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (2003) and Reinventing Bach (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. A third book, Controversy, is forthcoming. He lives in Brooklyn.

Photo Credit: Shimeng Tong, Georgetown University

Stacey Vanek Smith

Stacey Vanek Smith is a longtime public radio reporter and host. She currently hosts NPR’s The Indicator from Planet Money, a daily podcast covering business and economics. She has also served as a correspondent and host for Planet Money and Marketplace. A native of Idaho, Stacey is a graduate of Princeton University, where she earned a BA in comparative literature and creative writing and had the great fortune to take a creative nonfiction class with John McPhee. She also holds a MS in journalism from Columbia University.

Photo Credit: Sylvie Rosokoff