On Tuesday, April 14 at 7 p.m., Montclair Public Library will host a discussion examining women as writers and readers and their role as a driving force in the publishing world. Topics include the role of female authors today, why women read and what they want to read.
Panelists include three local authors: Myriam Alvarez, Molly Raskin and Ingrid Steffensen. The speakers each bring a unique perspective gathered from experiences in the fiction, nonfiction and memoir publishing realms.
This program is free and open to the public. The library is handicapped accessible and can provide assistive listening devices upon request. For a full list of programs, please visit www.montclairlibrary.org/calendar or call 973-744-0500 ext. 2235.
About the Panelists
Myriam Alvarez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1996, she moved to New York City, where she worked for 12 years as a foreign correspondent for an international news agency, at the United Nations Headquarters. She has over 20 years of experience as a journalist and freelance writer. Currently, she writes for several Hispanic magazines. She lives in New Jersey, with her husband and two sons. Flowers in the Dust is her first novel. For more information, go to www.myriamalvarez.com.
Molly Knight Raskin is a freelance writer, reporter, and producer, formerly of The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Prior to that, she worked as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, where she covered breaking news and wrote features for the Arts & Society section. Molly writes frequently about health and medicine. In 2007 she was honored with a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism and in 2010 she received the American Psychoanalytic Association Award for Excellence in Journalism. For the past ten years, Molly has written for newspapers, magazines, fashion advertorials, and book reviews. A graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, she began her career as a reporter for Fairchild Publications. Her very first freelance story -- an unsolicited pitch she sent on a whim -- landed in the style section of The Washington Post.
Ingrid Steffensen holds a BA from the University of Virginia, an MA from Yale University, and a PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. She has taught art and architectural history at Princeton, Rutgers, NJIT, and Bryn Mawr. She is the author of numerous articles and books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and architecture. Having discovered a passion for high-performance driving and a desire to write for a broader audience, she has recently written about such topics as Frank Lloyd Wright’s automobiles, Bruce Springsteen’s dog, and the decade-long exchange of a cheap bottle of plonk between two sets of friends. When she is not in the classroom nor at home in suburban New Jersey with her husband and daughter, she may be found hurtling around the racetrack with her crash helmet on and her stability control off.
