Look who’s coming to dinner!

The 65^th Book & Author Dinner will be held Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.  The honored authors for the 2010 event are Sam Beall, Sarah Blake, Noah Boyd, Dean King, Phyllis Theroux and Abraham Verghese.  Bob Deans, noted author featured at the 62nd Book & Author Dinner, will serve as Master of Ceremonies for this annual sell-out event that is the longest-running dinner of its kind in the country.

Please click here to make your reservation!

Sam Beall, The Blackberry Farm Cookbook: Four Seasons of Great Food and the Good Life 

Sam grew up on Blackberry Farm, following his mother through the kitchen and falling in love with the woods and the fields. After attending The University of Tennessee and The California Culinary Academy, Sam had the good fortune to apprentice at The French Laundry, where he worked in the dining room, the kitchen and the garden. Also, working at the Ritz-Carlton, Cowgirl Creamery and California wineries, he fell in love with heirloom ingredients, artisanal food products, wine and a way of life.

As the proprietor of the inn, Sam has been responsible for the accumulation of one of the nation's best wine cellars – with a Wine Spectator Grand Award-winning wine list - as well as the development of Blackberry's The FarmStead, with its heirloom gardens, dairy, creamery, salumeria, honeyhouse and preservation kitchen, while gaining the highest awards and accolades for hotel and restaurants from all of the major magazines and industry publications.

Sam is also active in his community, serving as board member for the Maryville Farmer’s Market, former board member of the Foothills Land Conservancy, and member of YPO (Young President’s Organization).

Along with his wife, Mary Celeste, and their four children, Sam lives -- and cooks -- from the farm. Sam shares his life—both in the kitchen and in the field—through his new book THE BLACKBERRY FARM COOKBOOK: FOUR SEASONS OF GREAT FOOD AND THE GOOD LIFE. Blackberry Farm is, to him, not simply a business, but his life, and he brings equal measures of passion, celebration and knowledge to Blackberry Farm and the effort to continue to raise the level of service and experience to new heights.

Sarah Blake, The Postmistress 

photo by Ralph Alswang

Acclaimed author Sarah Blake vividly brings back the world of letters and radio, and creates two of the most indelible heroines in recent fiction in THE POSTMISTRESS.  Blake, the author of the highly-praised novel, Grange House, delivers a suspenseful, probing and elegantly crafted novel set just before America was drawn into World War II.  With extraordinary relevance to the way we live now, the story moves from a small Cape Cod town, to London during the Blitz, and the refugee crisis in continental Europe. In the process, Blake prompts us to examine how we respond to the perils, injustices and great moral questions of our own time.

Born in New York City, Sarah Blake has a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University. She is the author of a chapbook of poems, Full Turn (Pennywhistle Press, 1989), an artist book, Runaway Girls (Hand Made Press, 1997) in collaboration with the artist, Robin Kahn, and two novels. Her first novel, Grange House, (Picador, 2000) was named a “New and Noteworthy” paperback in August, 2001 by The New York Times. Her second novel, THE POSTMISTRESS, was published by Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam in February 2010. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Good Housekeeping, US News and World Reports, The Chicago Tribune and elsewhere.

Sarah taught high school and college English for many years in Colorado and New York. She has taught fiction workshops at the Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown, MA, The Writer’s Center, in Bethesda MD, The University of Maryland, and The George Washington University. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, the poet Joshua Weiner, and their two sons. Her website can be found at sarahblakebooks.com.

Noah Boyd, The Bricklayer

Steve Vail isn’t looking for trouble. And he certainly isn’t looking to be a hero. But when someone starts killing high-profile enemies of the FBI and demanding millions to end the deadly spree, Vail is the only one with the skills, smarts, guts—and disregard for the rules—to do what needs to be done.

In THE BRICKLAYER, Noah Boyd introduces Steve Vail, a sexy, tough guy who hates authority almost as much as he loves catching killers. The suits can’t control him. Criminals can’t outsmart him. And readers won’t be able to resist him. Witty, sexy, and filled with sophisticated and harrowing action scenes, THE BRICKLAYER has enough plot twists to keep readers engrossed all the way to its jaw-dropping, surprise ending—and leave them gasping for more.

Noah Boyd is a pseudonym for a former FBI agent who spent 13 months as a Marine in Vietnam before returning to the U.S. and joining the Bureau in 1972. For twenty years Boyd worked for the Bureau in Detroit, tracking down serial killers including the infamous Highland Park Strangler. During that time, he took a special three-month assignment in Seattle to work on the high-profile Green River Murders case.

Despite a stellar track record of solving several high-profile murder cases, Boyd clashed with his superiors when he published a book unflattering to the FBI. After being threatened with suspension for 45 days without pay, he got into trouble again for blasting his boss in a national magazine article. He retired from the FBI in 1993 and began writing full-time.

Boyd works on cold cases when he’s not writing. He is the father of two grown children and lives with his wife in New Hampshire.

Dean King, Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival

The astounding story of the brave women of China's Long March, from the author of Skeletons on the Zahara.

In October 1934, the Chinese Red Army found itself facing annihilation, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Nationalist soldiers. Rather than surrender, 86,000 Red soldiers, led by a young Mao Zedong, embarked on an epic flight to safety. Only thirty were women. Their trek would eventually cover 4,000 miles, crossing China from east to west and from south to north, over 370 days. Under enemy fire, they climbed Tibetan peaks, crossed high-altitude swamps, scrambled over chain bridges, and trudged through the frigid deserts of the northwest. Several of the women were wounded, and others gave birth during the march and had to leave their babies behind. Fewer than 10,000 of the Red soldiers would survive the entire journey, but remarkably all of the women would live to tell the tale. 

UNBOUND is an amazing story of love, friendship, and survival written by a new master of adventure narrative. On two trips to China, King trekked in the Snowy Mountains and highland swamps of northwestern Sichuan--the most perilous section of the Long March--and interviewed the last surviving woman who made the Long March.

A native of Richmond, Virginia, Dean King is an award-winning author of nonfiction books.  A former contributing editor to Men’s Journal, Dean has written for National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Esquire, Travel & Leisure, New York and the New York Times, among others. His books include the bestselling Skeletons on the Zahara, which was the subject of a two-hour special documentary by the History Channel and is currently being developed as a feature film and the highly acclaimed Patrick O'Brian companion books A Sea of Words (1995) and Harbors and High Seas (1996). His biography Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed (2000) was a Daily Telegraph book of the year. 

Phyllis Theroux, The Journal Keeper:  A Memoir

photo by Duane Berger

In THE JOURNAL KEEPER, Theroux touches on topics that occupy us all.  As Elizabeth Strout, Puliter Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge says, “It’s all here – births, deaths, and marriages – and the reader is invited into the intimacies of a world that is both familiar and full of surprises.”  Theroux finds universal themes, but her words breathe life into her experiences in a way only a writer can.  Even as she frets over financial woes or the new and not entirely welcome sensation of getting older, she finds joy in the people bustling around her in her new hometown, the citizens of small-town Ashland who buoy her spirits, and her mother’s dignified, straightforward, and even amused approach to her own impending death.

Phyllis Theroux is an essayist, columnist, teacher and author.  Born in San Francisco, California, she is the critically acclaimed author of California and Other States of Grace, a memoir, two collections of essays, Peripheral Visions and Nightlights: Bedtime Stories for Parents in the Dark and an anthology, The Book of Eulogies.   Her first children’s book,  Serefina Under the Circumstances, was published by Greenwillow Press.  In 2002 a novella,  Giovanni’s Light, was published at Christmas. Her newest book, The Journal Keeper: A Memoir, is being published by Grove Atlantic in March 2010. 

A contributing essayist on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer from 1992 – 1996,  her columns, op-ed pieces, reviews and feature stories have  appeared in various newspapers  including The New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and International Herald Tribune.  In the l980’s, she was a monthly columnist for Parents Magazine.  In the l990’s she wrote a monthly column for House Beautiful. 

The founder of  Nightwriters, which  conducts writing and creativity seminars in the United States and abroad, she occasionally conducts one-on-one editorial seminars with individual writers who come to spend time working in her writer’s cottage in Ashland, Virginia.

A graduate of Manhattanville College, with a B.A. in Philosophy, she lives with her husband, Ragan Phillips in Ashland, Virginia.

Abraham Verghese, Cutting For Stone

photo by Joanne Chan

Marion and Shiva Stone are born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be their passion for the same woman that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him, Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, CUTTING FOR STONE is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.

Abraham Verghese is Professor and Senior Associate Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.  He was the founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, San Antonio, where he is now an adjunct professor. He is the author of My Own Country, a 1994 NBCC Finalist and a Time Best Book of the Year, and The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has published essays and short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.  He lives in Palo Alto, California.

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