Author interviews almost always focus on questions regarding an author’s latest publication (and that’s great because it’s how readers discover new books!) but sometimes it’s fun to ask authors to talk about their lives beyond the book they’ve just written. Authors Answer poses 20 standing questions and asks authors to pick FIVE that they want to write about.
I began Authors Answer in 2020 as a stand alone blog. In 2025 I moved the project into a Substack newsletter. All of the posts that appeared on the original blog are available below. [You can also scroll through the original posts by date.]
Are you an author? Visit the Questions page to pick five of the twenty questions you’d like to answer and have shared in the Authors Answer Substack Newsletter.
Jonathan Howland lives in San Francisco. After 36 years’ teaching and working in independent schools, he now alternates between climbing trips in western states and writing, gardening, and
In a career that’s included work as a journalist, a psychologist, and the founder of a national art consulting company, Maggie Smith now adds novelist to her resume
Nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and The Millions, Dina Greenberg’s poetry, fiction, essays, and articles have appeared widely in literary journals, anthologies, and peer-reviewed journals,
Kathleen Stone knows something about female ambition. As a lawyer, she was a law clerk to a federal judge, a litigation partner in a law firm, and senior
Fiction writer, poet, antipoet, gentle quasi-misanthrope, librarian, Philip Brunetti has been writing fiction and poetry since his early 20s. His innovative work has been published in various online
Ruthie Marlenée is the Mexican-American author of Agave Blues, Isabela’s Island and Curse of the Ninth and is currently working on the sequel, And Still Her Voice. A
Marlena Fiol and Ed O’Connor are spiritual seekers whose writing explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. They have devoted themselves to
Lyn Liao Butler was born in Taiwan and moved to the States when she was seven. In her past and present lives, she has been: a concert pianist, a
Alana Quintana Albertson has written thirty romance novels, rescued five-hundred death-row shelter dogs, and danced one thousand rumbas. A graduate of Stanford (B.A.) and Harvard (M.Ed.), she lives
J.P. O’Connell is the author of Hotel Portofino, a heady historical fiction drama about a British family who open an upper-class hotel on the magical Italian Riviera during