Alice Mattison and Clifford Thompson

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VIRTUALLY | Alice Mattison and Clifford Thompson will read as part of the Writers Reading series. 

Alice Mattison’s most recent book, The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale, is now available in paperback. Her new novel, Conscience, will be published by Pegasus Books in August. Several of her previous novels and story collections have been New York Times Notable Books or Editors’ Choices, including the novels When We Argued All Night and The Book Borrower and the story collection In Case We're Separated, which won the Connecticut Book Award for Fiction. Her book of poems is Animals. Mattison’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and have been reprinted in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories. She holds a bachelor's degree from Queens College and a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard. Mattison lives in New Haven, Connecticut.  

Clifford Thompson received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, published by Autumn House Press, which has also published his memoir, Twin of Blackness (2015). His most recent books are Big Man and the Little Men and What it Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man's Blues. His essays on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in publications including The Village Voice, The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Commonweal, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, Oxford American, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Black Issues Book Review. He is the author of a novel, Signifying Nothing. For over a dozen years he served as the editor of Current Biography, and he has held adjunct/visiting professorships at Columbia University, New York University, Queens College, and Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in Brooklyn.