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.
Lucy Jane Bledsoe is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Evolution of Love, Lava Falls, and A Thin Bright Line, which the New York Times
Felice Cohen, author, speaker, Holocaust educator, is known nationally and internationally as the woman who lived in the world’s smallest apartment. Her award-winning book 90 Lessons for Living
Robert Aquinas McNally is the author or coauthor of ten nonfiction books, most recently The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age,
Karen Odden received her PhD in English from NYU, where she wrote her dissertation on Victorian literature and history. After teaching at UW-Milwaukee and writing for academia, she
Maria Sipilä is CEO of Sipila Consulting. She is a leading thinker on growth and advises companies of all sizes and public organizations on growth strategies and brands.
Leslie Schrock is an investor and entrepreneur with a decade of experience working at the intersection of health and technology. She helped grow Rock Health, a startup accelerator
Deborah Kalb is the author of George Washington and the Magic Hat and John Adams and the Magic Bobblehead, middle grade novels for kids. The third in
Lara Tupper is the author of Off Island, a novel, A Thousand and One Nights, a novel, and Amphibians, a linked short story collection forthcoming in 2021
Hunter Howe Cates is the author of Oklahoma’s Atticus, the true story of how his grandfather defended a Cherokee man falsely accused of murder in Tulsa, 1953. Cates
Ted Scheinman is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine and the author of Camp Austen: My Life as an Accidental Jane Austen Superfan (FSG Originals, 2018).