2022 KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Alice McDermott has published eight novels and an essay collection, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction.  Her eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award and The 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. In 2018 it was awarded France’s Prix Femina for a work in translation. Her seventh novel, Someone (2013), was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Three of her previous novels, After This (2006), At Weddings and Wakes (1992) and That Night (1987) were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy (1998) won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998.  That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2010, she received the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harpers, Commonweal, and elsewhere. For more than two decades she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University