Authors in conversation
These international bestselling authors will give talks and sign books at the
2026 Westchester Book Festival (buy tickets here).
Read their bios below.
’Pemi Aguda
’Pemi Aguda is an award-winning writer celebrated for her haunting, lyrical storytelling, including One Leg on Earth and Ghostroots, the latter a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Trained as an architect in Lagos, Nigeria, she brings a vivid sense of space, atmosphere, and emotional depth to her work, often exploring themes of identity, urban life, and the uncanny. Her writing has been widely recognized for its originality and power. She lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Ada Calhoun
Ada Calhoun is an acclaimed author and journalist known for her insightful and deeply personal explorations of relationships, culture, and modern life. She is the author of books such as Crush and Why We Can’t Sleep, the latter a bestselling work examining the pressures faced by Generation X women. A contributor to publications like The New York Times and The Atlantic, her writing blends memoir, reporting, and cultural analysis with honesty and wit. She is recognized for capturing the emotional complexities of contemporary life.
Madeline Cash
Madeline Cash is the founder of Forever Magazine and the author of the story collection Earth Angel. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, The Baffler, The Sewanee Review, The Drift, and Bomb, among other publications. Lost Lambs is her debut novel, and is a sharp, darkly funny literary novel about family, faith, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Blending emotional depth with biting humor, the novel explores love, grief, and the complicated ties that bind us.
Hernan Diaz
Hernan Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author, best known for his novel Trust. His debut novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the William Saroyan International Prize, earning widespread acclaim and international readership. Trust further cemented his reputation, receiving the Kirkus Prize, being longlisted for the Booker Prize, and being named one of the year’s best books by major publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time. His most recent novel, Ply, turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination. His writing has also appeared in leading literary journals such as The Paris Review, Granta, and The Atlantic, and he has received numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is a bestselling author, journalist, and public intellectual known for his engaging explorations of human behavior, decision-making, and social dynamics. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he is the author of influential books such as Outliers, The Tipping Point, Revenge of the Tipping Point, Blink, and David and Goliath. His work blends storytelling with research to challenge conventional thinking and reveal surprising insights about how people and societies function. He is also the host of the popular podcast Revisionist History, where he reexamines overlooked or misunderstood events and ideas. In The American Way of Killing, Gladwell explores America’s unique relationship with gun violence and its contributing cultural factors.
elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert is an award-winning journalist and author known for her incisive writing on climate change, science, and the environment. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, she is best known for her book The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Her work combines rigorous reporting with compelling storytelling to explore the impact of human activity on the natural world. She is widely recognized as one of the leading voices on environmental issues today. Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays.
David McCloskey
David McCloskey is a bestselling author of high-stakes espionage thrillers, including The Seventh Floor and The Persian, praised for their gripping plots and insider authenticity. A former CIA analyst, he worked at headquarters in Langley and in field stations across the Middle East, experiences that deeply inform his fiction. He is also the cohost of The Rest Is Classified, a popular podcast exploring intelligence, espionage, and global power. His work is known for blending real-world tradecraft with fast-paced storytelling. He lives in Dallas, Texas.
David Nasaw
David Nasaw is a distinguished historian and biographer known for his deeply researched and compelling works on American history, including The Wounded Generation. A professor emeritus of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, he has written acclaimed biographies of figures such as Andrew Carnegie and William Randolph Hearst. His work is recognized for its rich detail and ability to illuminate the social and cultural forces that shape the United States.
David Pogue
David Pogue is a seven-time Emmy Award-winning correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, a New York Times bestselling author, five-time TED speaker, and host of 20 PBS NOVA science specials. He was The New York Times' weekly tech columnist from 2000 to 2013. He has written or coauthored more than 120 books, including the bestselling Missing Manual series, six For Dummies titles, three Pogue's Basics books, How to Prepare for Climate Change, and his bestselling 2026 book,
Apple: The First 50 Years. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale, Pogue spent a decade conducting and arranging Broadway musicals before turning to journalism. He has received a Loeb Award, two Webby Awards, and an honorary doctorate in music. He lives with his wife, Nicki, near New York City.
Kevin Powers
Kevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. Since publishing his first novel in 2012, his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Prix littéraire du Monde prix étranger, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, among other recognitions. He was a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009-2012 and later held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. A U.S. Army veteran of the war in Iraq, Kevin now lives on Florida’s First Coast with his family.
Maria Semple
Maria Semple is the bestselling author of Today Will Be Different (2016), Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012), This One is Mine (2008), and the most recent Go Gentle (2026). Her novels have been translated into 40 languages. Before writing fiction, Maria wrote for the TV shows Arrested Development, Mad About You, Ellen, 90210 and others. Go Gentle by Maria Semple, an Oprah's Book Club pick, is a novel about Adora Hazzard, a Stoic philosopher whose orderly life is upended by a mysterious stranger. The book blends humor, romance, and philosophy as Adora, who believes happiness comes from desiring only what you have, finds her principles challenged by desire and a mid-life transformation. It's described as a witty, thrilling story of self-discovery, following in the vein of Semple's other works like Where'd You Go, Bernadette.
Nafissa Thompson-SpIRES
Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of the award-winning, National Book Awardlonglisted short story collection, Heads of the Colored People. She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Illinois. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review Daily, New York magazine’s “The Cut,” The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares,400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619–2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications. Her debut novel, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Rich Milford, will be available on October 13, 2026. She is the recipient of a 2024 United States Artists Grant and a 2019 Whiting Award.
Jia Lynn Yang
Jia Lynn Yang is an accomplished journalist and author known for her deeply reported and compelling storytelling, including One Mighty and Irresistible Tide. A longtime reporter and editor at The New York Times, she has covered business, technology, and immigration, bringing clarity and human depth to complex issues. Her work often explores identity, policy, and the immigrant experience through a powerful historical lens. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Perrin Ireland (Moderator)
Perrin Ireland has built an art practice inside scientific and policy institutions, telling stories situated between what we know about the planet and our belonging to it. From illustrating a marine biology lab’s research at Brown University while she earned her BA in human biology in 2008 to—at present—partnering with publications, researchers, and presidential libraries. Perrin has been a visual storyteller at the Natural Resources Defense Council (2012-2022), producing watercolor animated videos about climate change, oceans, and endangered animals.
Adam Dalva (Moderator)
Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. He is the President of the National Book Critics Circle. Adam is a Contributing Editor of The Yale Review and an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University.
Adam is a graduate of NYU's Fiction MFA Program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow. He has received fellowships from Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle, The Bergman Estate on Fårö, Iceland’s Gullkistan, the Vermont Studio Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Wildacres. His graphic novel, Olivia Twist, was published by Dark Horse in 2019. Adam previously served as a judge of the 2022 Story Prize, the Books Editor of Words Without Borders, and the Senior Fiction Editor of Guernica.
Megan Labrise (Moderator)
Megan Labrise is the editor-at-large of Kirkus Reviews. She’s the executive producer and host of Fully Booked, a weekly podcast featuring author interviews and reading recommendations, and a past president of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives in New York.
Wadza Mhute (Moderator)
Bio to come
Leigh Newman (Moderator)
Bio to come
Noah Oppenheim (Moderator)
Bio to come
Authors’ CORNER
These fantastic authors will be at The Katonah Reading Room for book signings and
meet and greet sessions throughout the day. No tickets are needed. The Katonah Reading Room is located at 19 Edgemont Road, Katonah. (Stay tuned for details!)
Read their bios below.
Local Author-1
