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Four more authors have been confirmed for our 2009 Seminar: HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth.

Francisco Goldman is the author, most recently, of The Art of Political Murder: Who killed the Bishop?, a non-fiction work on the Bishop Gerardi murder case in Guatemala. It was named a "Notable Book" by The New York Times for 2007, and a best book of the year by the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Economist. His three earlier novels are The Long Night of White Chickens, The Ordinary Seaman, and The Divine Husband. He last joined us in 2004, for Crossing Borders: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature. We happily welcome Francisco back to Key West.

Alan Cheuse, "The Voice of Books on National Public Radio" has been "reading for America" every week on NPR. He is the author of The Bohemians, a historical novel about John Reed and Louise Bryant, Fall Out of Heaven, which focused in large part on the life of his father, a pilot in the Red Air Force, during the 1930s, and the novels The Grandmothers' Club and The Light Possessed. His forthcoming novel To Catch the Lightning (October, 2008) follows the career of turn-of-the-century photographer Edward S. Curtis and his quest to photograph the western tribes of North America. Alan last joined us as a moderator in 2003 for Poetry: The Beautiful Changes.

We've just posted details for workshops by Alison Lurie & Edward Hower, Porter Shreve, and Bich Min Nguyen. Click the links to go to their respective workshop descriptions, or click here to see all of our workshop instructors.

Instructors, schedules, and details for our 2009 Writers' Workshop Program are now online. Poets Billy Collins and Dara Wier will join us again this year to offer their insight and expertise, and we'll have Mary Morris, Patricia O'Toole, and Alan Cheuse leading workshops which focus on the writing of history and historical fiction. Click here for links to complete information about each of these workshops. We'll be posting more information about additional workshop opportunities soon, including instructors Alison Lurie, Edward Hower, Bich Min Nguyen, and Porter Shreve.

One of last year's workshop attendees, Claire Lipschultz, had a story air last week on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." She worked on it in a workshop with Bich Min Nguyen this past January. You can listen to it here.

Three Scholarships are available to writers, students, and librarians to offset the cost of the Writer's Workshops. This year, we are particularly interested in supporting emerging historians and writers of historical fiction. Last year's scholarship winners and Workshop attendees include Nami Mun, whose Miles from Nowhere was subsequently accepted for publication by Riverhead Press; Mehdi Okasi, whose work is forthcoming in the 2009 Best New American Voices anthology; and Kristen-Paige Madonia, whom I recently interviewed, and who will be a Writer in Residence at The Studios of Key West this fall.

We've just confirmed the addition of two novelists for next January's Seminar, HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. Elizabeth Gaffney is a former editor under George Plimpton at Paris Review, a translator of German literature, and the author of Metropolis, a post-Civil War story of love and crime set among New York City's immigrant communities. The stereopticon image above of immigrant men working as streetlayers came out of her research for this book. Visit Gaffney's author page on our site for links and more information.

Peter Ho Davies is a Guggenheim Fellow, a faculty member of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, and the author of The Welsh Girl, a novel set in and around a POW camp built by the British during WWII in the remote mountains of northern Wales.

We will continue to add more writers for next January's Seminar. You can find the up-to-date roster here, with links to information about each author. Tickets are still available for the event, however we do expect to sell out early. Register for the event here.

I think writing about history is not unlike writing science fiction or certain other genre novels that are outside the present time and reality in that they actually sometimes serve as more effective metaphors for what's going on in the present world. I am very interested in that. And the way that you can talk about a world that has a lot of structural similarities to the present but is very different— in some ways be more honest, be more probing, or simply because of the distance from people's contemporary reality, push into certain corners that otherwise might be uncomfortable.

—Elizabeth Gaffney, from an interview with Robert Birnbaum.

A decade ago, the Key West Literary Seminar began offering financial assistance to individuals who would otherwise be unable to attend the Seminar. Last year, three new scholarships were introduced to recognize excellence from new and emerging writers. Through the generosity of Joyce Johnson, The Dogwood Foundation, and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida, these scholarships are once again available. The Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award, the Scotti Merrill Scholarship, and the Marianne Russo Scholarship each provide full tuition for either session of the 2009 Seminar and the writer's workshop program. In addition, these scholarships may provide support for travel, lodging, and living expenses while in Key West and an opportunity to appear on stage at the Seminar. This year we are especially interested in supporting writers of historical fiction.

John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner, will be joining us in January for Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. We'll be posting more about him soon. In the meantime, you can listen to an excellent interview with
him on National Public Radio here. Visit Schwartz's web site here.

The New York Times reported last week on the discovery of a sound recording made in 1860, nearly twenty years before Thomas Edison first captured the sound of the words "Mary had a little lamb" on a piece of tinfoil. Oddly, this recording, made by Parisian typesetter Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was never intended to be heard. The idea of audio playback had not been conceived, let alone by Martinville, and his intent, to create a paper record of human speech, related more to stenography than to phonography. We have come, of course, a very long way; the in-your-ear-in-an-instant .mp3 which accompanies the Times article is proof of that.

When the Key West Literary Seminar began in 1983 as a program of the Friends of the Monroe County Library, audio recordings were ubiquitous in the average American home. Vinyl records had been around for a generation, and cassette technology had made it possible to listen to your favorite recordings in the car or anywhere you and your Walkman, invented by Sony in 1979, might travel. Furthermore, cassettes were easily recorded upon, easily recorded over. One could now, with a minimum of equipment, affordably create audio recordings of any event. The Key West Literary Seminar did not immediately pick up on the possibilities afforded by this technology. The early years' events were assembled on a nothing budget as a labor of love. Many of the organizers were remarkably young. Key West was a surface and a beneath-the-surface; an anonymity which implied assent toward myriad behaviors thrived and was prized. Posterity was on no one's mind.

We are pleased to announce the addition of David Nasaw to our roster of panelists for 2009's Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent publication is Andrew Carnegie, awarded the 2007 New York Historical Society Prize in American History and chosen as a "notable" book of 2006 by the New York Times and a "best" book of the year by the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, and Library Journal. Nasaw has also been awarded the Bancroft Prize for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Non-Fiction, the Ambassador Book Prize for Biography, and the Sperber Prize for Biography. Professor Nasaw is a historian of the first rank, and his participation in the Seminar adds heft to what promises to be a lively discussion of truth, "truth," and truths among novelists and historians alike.

Click here for David Nasaw's complete biography, bibliography, and links to published interviews.

We are very happy to announce that Madison Smartt Bell will be with us in January, for our twenty-seventh annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth.

History, of course, is ever-unfurling. We're living it right now. Fiction offers a focusing lens whereby the sense of a distant historical epoch may be rendered more clear. One point of access into our theme is by paying attention to what's going on in the world, and considering the relevance of this or that soon-to-be-historical issue to the work of our assembled roster of historical fiction writers and historians. In regards to Madison Smartt Bell, the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels which chart the Haitian revolution of 1791-1803, it is worthwhile to think of the recent and current travails of our neighbor, Haiti. A front-page piece in this Sunday's New York Times examines the current trend of nostalgia for the reign of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the notorious despot who, together with his father, François, terrorized the people of Haiti for more than 20 years. While Bell's focus has tended to land deeper in the Haitian past, an awareness of Haiti's twentieth century deepens the ultimate tragedy of the histories Bell has chosen to recreate. We'll be looking more into Bell's work here soon. In the meantime, the interview with him here gives some insight into his pursuit of Haitian history through the means of historical fiction.