Annual Book & Authors Luncheon
The Burlingame Library Foundation held its 5th Annual Book & Authors Luncheon at Poplar Creek Grill, 1700 Coyote Point Dr, San Mateo on May 7th, 2011.
Authors Michael Krasny, Jack Bowen & Adam Haslett
Michael Krasny, Ph.D., is host of KQED’s award-winning Forum, a news and public affairs program that concentrates on the arts, culture, health, business, and technology. Forum is one of KQED’s most-popular shows and the nation’s most-listened-to locally produced public radio talk show. Since 1970, he has been a professor of English at San Francisco State University and has taught at Stanford University and University of California, San Francisco. He is the author of Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest, published in fall 2010, and Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life. Dr. Krasny was one of our distinguished authors at the Burlingame Library Foundation 2nd Annual Book & Authors Luncheon in 2008.
Jack Bowen’s debut novel, “The Dream Weaver” achieved great success, making the San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller list in March 2006, the Amazon Top 500, and landing as one of the Kepler’s Bookstore top-10 sellers of the year in 2006. After then publishing a college philosophy textbook, Jack released his third book in 2010, If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers (Random House) of which the New York Times writes, "Takes bumper stickers seriously."
In addition to popular fiction, Jack has been invited to speak at academic philosophy conferences throughout the United States and in England. He has also published in numerous philosophy journals, primarily in ethics. Jack serves as the Senior Lecturer for the Great Books Program at Stanford University in the summers.
Jack graduated from Stanford University in 1995 with Honors in Human Biology. He went on to earn a Masters Degree in Philosophy from California State University, Long Beach graduating Summa Cum Laude. Following a six-year stint teaching philosophy and ethics at De Anza College, He has settled at Menlo School in Atherton where he teaches philosophy and coaches water polo.
Adam Haslett is the author of the short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novel Union Atlantic. His story collection was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and has been translated into fifteen languages. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center and residences at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. His essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Stories, and National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts.
In 2006, he won the PEN/Malamud Award for accomplishment in short fiction and has also won the PEN/WinshipAward for the best book by a New England author. A graduate of Swarthmore College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Yale Law School, he has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Columbia University.