Memoir, Biography & Autobiography

Sy Montgomery

Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, award-winning author, documentary scriptwriter, and radio commentator who writes for children as well as adults. Sy lives with her husband, author Howard Mansfield, in New Hampshire.

Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosuar (Simon & Schuster – The Free Press, 2009).

The Good Good Pig: My Life with Christopher Hogwood (Ballantine/Random House, 2006) is the story of an extraordinary pig and the profound effect he had on one women’s life as well as on a small New Hampshire town. A heartwarming tale about redefining family, creating community, and the nature of love. Sy Montgomery is the author of eleven previous award-winning books.

Jarvis Masters

Finding Freedom: Writing from Death Row (Padma Books, 1997; One Spirit, 2000) is a deeply moving, life-affirming memoir written from the netherworld of San Quentin’s Death Row. Roshi Bernie Glassman calls the work “an inspiring, exhilarating teaching on the life of a peacemaker in the midst of rage and despair…Masters is an extraordinary man.”

That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row with introduction by Pema Chodron.
(Harper Collins, 2010).

*A PEN USA Literary Award finalist in Creative Nonfiction.

Carlos Bentos

Carlos Bentos is a writer, singer, translator, restauranteur, and big-game angler of historic, Hemingway-esque proportions.

A Crew of One: True Stories of a Solitary Deep-Sea Angler (Tarcher, 2002) is part memoir, part instructional manual, and part adventure tale, but, above all, it is a compelling narrative that offers a new way of looking at fishing, the ocean, and being alone.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Stephanie Elizondo Griest graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1997 from the university of Texas at Austin in journalism and post-Soviet studies. she served as a Henry Luce scholar in Beijing and as a Scotty Reston fellow at The New York Times. Griest’s wanderlust has taken her to 21 countries in 4 years.

Around the Bloc: My Life inMoscow, Beijing, and Havana (Random House, 2004) “…Opening Around the Bloc is rather like popping the cork off a champagne bottle…[it] is clearly just the beginning for this gifted young writer,” Jon Lee Anderson, author of The Lion’s Grave.

Mexican Enough: My Life Along the Border Lines (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2008).

*Work in Progress: On Silence

Carol O’Biso

First Light (Paragon, 1989) chronicles an American woman’s experiences among the Maori elders of New Zealand. A classic.

*Work in Progress: A Well-Seasoned Life: A Daughter’s Tales of Her Father’s Kitchen

Enid Abrhami

Enid Abrhami lived two years in a small, remote village in Senegal, and she bears witness to her experiences in this breathtakingly beautiful memoir.

*Work in Progress: Rain Washed Over Me Under the Moon

Katherine Ketcham

Katherine Ketcham has been writing non-fiction books for 23 years. She has been the co-author, with different experts, of twelve books.
Amongst them:

The Spirituality of Imperfection (Bantam).

The Five elements of Self-Healing (Harmony).

Under the Influence: A guide to the Myths and Realities of Alcoholism (Bantam).

Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption by William Moyers with Katherine Ketcham (Viking, 2006).

Agate Nesaule

A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile (Soho Press, 1996/Penguin, 1997) received the following review from Patricia Hampfl in The New York Times Book Review: “Like all the best modern memoirs [this one] belongs to the quest of literature of our times. It is a story both heroic and chillingly humble.”

Rena Kornreich Gelissen with Heather Dune Macadam

Rena’s Promise: The Story of Two Sisters in Auschwitz (Beacon Press, 1995). An unforgettable memoir of a young woman’s survival of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Stagebaude, and the infamous death march. A breathtakingly heroic testimonial to the human spirit.

Laurie Lisle

Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keefe (Harper & Row, 1987) is considered by many the definitive biography of this American master. A classic.

Jesse Ventura

Jesse Ventura was elected Governor of Minnesota on the Reform Party ticket in 1998. Before that, he was a navy SEAL, professional wrestler (using the name Jesse “The Body” Ventura), and an occasional movie actor and radio personality.

In Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me, working with award-winning author Dick Russell, Ventura reveals for the first time why he left politics, and discusses the disastrous war in Iraq…why he sees our two-party system as corrupt…and what Fidel Castro told him about who was really behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

Dina Cheney

*Work in Progress: The Wakame Chronicles: A Journey from the White Foods to the Right Foods

Beth Terry

Beth Terry, author of Fake Plastic Fish (fakeplasticfish.com), the world’s best-known blog on how to have less plastic in your life.

*Work in Progress: Plastic Free: How one blogger kicked the habit and you can, too (Skyhorse, 2012)

Teresa Rhyne

*Work in Progress: The Dog Lived (and So Will I)

Matthew Gilbert

Matthew Gilbert is film and popular culture columnist and writer for the Boston Globe.

*Work in Progress: Off the Leash