Tea & Conversation with Best-Selling Author Christina Baker Kline

Join us for tea and conversation as Julie Maloney, Director of Women Reading Aloud, conducts an up-close and personal interview with best-selling American novelist, essayist, and editor, Christina Baker Kline at Bernardsville Public Library on Sunday, October 27 at 2:00 pm. Audience members will have a rare opportunity to ask the author questions about her work and her writing process.  A short reading as well as a book signing will follow the interview. 

Ms. Kline's newest novel, “Orphan Train,” was published by Harper/Collins in April and is currently #5 overall in books on USA TODAY's list.  It also hit all three New York Times bestseller lists this week, at #3 for e-books, #6 for combined, and at #14 for trade paperbacks.  It's also #3 on the Wall St. Journal e-book list and is on all the Indie lists this week (October 6, 2013).  

In addition to "Orphan Train," Ms. Kline's novels include "Bird in Hand," "The Way Life Should Be," "Desire Lines" and "Sweet Water."  She served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University from 2007 to 2011 and was an on-staff editor and writing coach at the social networking site SheWrites.com.  She is coeditor, with Anne Burt, of a collection of personal essays called "About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror" and also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, "Child of Mine and Room to Grow."  She is co-author, with her mother, Christina Looper Baker, of a book on feminist mothers and daughters, "The Conversation Begins."

Ms. Kline, a resident of Montclair, was born in Cambridge, England, and raised there as well as in the American South and Maine.  She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing.  In addition to Fordham, she has taught fiction and nonfiction writing, poetry, English literature, literary theory, and women’s studies at Yale, New York University, and Drew University.  She is a recent recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowship, a Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Fordham Faculty Research Grant. 

Interviewer Julie Maloney has worked in the arts as a performer and educator her entire life.  She is a poet and writer and founder/director of Women Reading Aloud (WRA), a not-for-profit organization that promotes women writers in New Jersey and beyond.  WRA holds workshops, special events, writing retreats, conferences and an on-going writing workshop series each spring and fall during which women writers of all genres hone their work in a salon type setting.  The annual Writer’s Weekend Retreat is held each April in Sea Girt, NJ.  In June, WRA returns for its fourth Greece Writer’s Retreat on the island of Alonnisos in the North Sporades.  Ms. Maloney is a frequent speaker on “Writing as a Life Tool.”

There is no charge to attend the program at the library, but advance sign-up is requested.  Register online at www.bernardsvillelibrary.org and follow the link from Adult Programs, or call the library at 908-766-0118 to sign up.