United for Libraries Virtual Gala Author Tea

Free registration sponsored by Baker & Taylor.

Authors include: Anna Rasche, Alice Austen, Marcie R. Rendon, and Edward Underhill. Moderated by Donna Seaman, Editor of Adult Books, Booklist.

Anna Rasche (The Stone Witch of Florence) is a historian and gemologist who has previously worked in the jewelry collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as a curatorial fellow at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Rasche's debut is based on original research she conducted on the uses of gemstones in medieval medicine at the Cooper Hewitt Museum and onsite in Italy. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and infant daughter.

Alice Austen (33 Place Brugmann) won the John Cassavetes Award for her debut film Give Me Liberty (writer/producer). She is a past resident of the Royal Court Theatre and her internationally produced plays include Animal Farm (Steppenwolf Theatre), Water, Cherry Orchard Massacre (Vestnik Evropy), and Girls in the Boat (Dramatic Publishing). She studied creative writing under Seamus Heaney at Harvard. Austen currently lives in Milwaukee and is working on a new film and her next novel.

Marcie R. Rendon (Where They Last Saw Her), citizen of the White Earth Nation, is one of O: The Oprah Magazine’s 31 Native American Authors to Read Right Now and a McKnight Distinguished Artist Award winner. Her debut novel, Murder on the Red River, received the Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel Award, and her second novel, Girl Gone Missing, was nominated for the G. P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award. The creative mind of Raving Native Theater, she curated Twin Cities Public Television’s Art Is...CreativeNativeResilience.

Edward Underhill (The In-Between Bookstore) grew up in the suburbs of Wisconsin, where he could not walk to anything, so he had to make up his own adventures. He studied music in college, spent several years living in very small apartments in New York, and currently resides in California with his partner and a talkative black cat. He is the author of two young adult novels, Always the Almost and This Day Changes Everything, and a book for adults, The In-Between Bookstore.