Author: Author's Answer

Cathryn J. Prince brings a journalist’s sensibility to her work through meticulous research and investigation. Prince’s passion lies in revealing and personalizing little known and forgotten episodes of history, while placing them in a larger political and cultural context. Prince is the author of Queen of the Mountaineers: The Trailblazing Life of Fanny Bullock Workman (Chicago Review Press, 2019), American Daredevil: The Extraordinary Life of Richard Halliburton, the World’s First Celebrity Travel Writer (Chicago Review Press, 2016), Death in the Baltic: The WWII Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), awarded the Military Writers Society of America 2013 Founders Award and selected as a Military Book Club selection. She is also the author of A Professor, a President, and a Meteor: The Birth of American Science (Prometheus, 2010), which won the Connecticut Press Club’s 2011 Book Award for nonfiction. Additionally, she wrote Burn the Town and Sack the Banks: Confederates Attack Vermont! (Carrol & Graf, 2006) and Shot from the Sky: American POWs in Switzerland (US Naval Institute Press, 2003).

Prince is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Journalism at SUNY-Purchase in New York. She also worked as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Switzerland and in New York, where she reported on the United Nations. She holds an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University, a B.A. in international affairs from The George Washington University, and an M.A. in American studies from Fairfield University. She is a frequent contributor to the Christian Science Monitor, The Times of Israel, and The Journal of the American Revolution, as well as several regional magazines.

Bob Eckstein is a New York Times bestseller (Footnotes From the World’s Greatest Bookstores), an award-winning writer and illustrator, New Yorker cartoonist and world’s leading snowman expert (author of The Illustrated History of the Snowman). He has written thousands of pieces worldwide from magazines ranging from Playboy to MAD magazine. He is also a Contributing Editor for Writer’s Digest magazine and teaches writing and drawing at New York University. His next book All’s Fair in Love & Fair; Cartoons by the World’s Greatest Cartoonists published by Princeton Architectural Press in Oct. 2020.

Alexandra Zapruder began her career as a member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A graduate of Smith College, she served on the curatorial team for the museum’s exhibition for young visitors, Remember The Children, Daniel’s Story. She earned her Ed.M. in Education at Harvard University in 1995. In 2002, Alexandra completed her first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, which was published by Yale University Press and won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. It has since been published in Dutch and Italian. She wrote and co-produced I’m Still Here, a documentary film for young audiences based on her book, which aired on MTV in May 2005, a multimedia edition of Salvaged Pages and related educational materials designed for middle and high school teachers.

In November 2016, she published her second book, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, which tells the story of her grandfather’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination. She curated a permanent exhibition titled And Still I Write: Young Diarists on War and Genocide which opened at Holocaust Museum Houston in 2019 and currently serves as the Education Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation in Washington, D.C. She also sits on the Board of Directors for the Educators’ Institute for Human Rights, a nonprofit that develops partnerships with teachers in post-conflict countries to provide training in best practices on human rights, genocide prevention, and Holocaust education. She has been published in Parade, LitHub, Smithsonian Magazine, and The New York Times.

Nancy Johnson is the author of the debut novel, The Kindest Lie, forthcoming from William Morrow/HarperCollins in April 2021. The book centers on race, class, and family at the time of Obama’s election as president. Nancy manages brand communications at a large nonprofit and is a former Emmy-nominated, award-winning television journalist. Her work has been supported by Hurston/Wright Foundation, Tin House, Eckerd College Writers in Paradise, and Kimbilio Fiction. An excerpt of her novel received first runner-up recognition by the 2018 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. A native of Chicago’s South Side, Nancy lives in the city’s South Loop.

Sunny Stalter-Pace is Hargis Associate Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Auburn University. Her first book, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway, was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2013. Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and Dance (Northwestern University Press, 2020) is her first biography.

Jennifer Steil is an award-winning author and journalist. Her new novel, Exile Music (Viking) follows the lives of a family of Austrian Jewish musicians who seek refuge from the Nazis in Bolivia in 1938.

Her most recent novel, The Ambassador’s Wife (Doubleday 2015), won the 2013 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition Best Novel award. The novel has received much acclaim, notably in the Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and The New York Times Book Review.

Jennifer’s first book, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Broadway Books, 2010), a memoir about her time as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana’a, was hailed by The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Sydney Morning Herald.

NATALIE JENNER was born in England, raised in Canada, and graduated from the University of Toronto with consecutive degrees in English Literature and Law. She worked for decades in the legal industry and also founded the independent bookstore Archetype Books in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs. The Jane Austen Society is the first published novel for this lifelong devotee of all things Jane Austen and comes out on May 26, 2020 from St. Martin’s Press (North America) and on May 28, 2020 from Orion (UK).