In Also a Poet, bestselling author Ada Calhoun explores the fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession with a great poet, and in the process faces her own past and her father’s. In the novel The Hero of this Story, National Book Award longlister Elizabeth McCracken mines the relationship between a protagonist and a larger-than-life mother. Together, Calhoun and McCracken navigate the connections and histories between subjects and characters and their creative parents.

FESTIVAL FRIENDS PASS SESSION

Moderator: Rose Smith, winner of The Missouri Review‘s 27th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and finalist for Narrative Magazine‘s 2018 Story Contest

Ada Calhoun, Elizabeth McCracken, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, The Hero Of This Book