Kirthana Ramisetti & Joyce Maynard

The 2022 Brattleboro Literary Festival is celebrating the 21st year with its first live and in person festival since 2019. Kirthana Ramisetti  is a former entertainment reporter for Newsday and the New York Daily News, where she wrote her fair share of stories about the lives (and deaths) of the rich and famous.  She has a master’s degree in creative writing from Emerson College, and her work has been published in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.  Dava Shastri’s Last Day is her first novel, and she lives in New York City. Joyce Maynard began publishing her stories in magazines when she was thirteen years old and came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story in 1972, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist, a regular contributor to NPR and magazines including Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and many more.  Joyce Maynard is the author of eighteen books, including the New York Times bestselling novel, Labor Day and To Die For (both adapted for film), Under the Influence and the memoirs, At Home in the World  and The Best of Us.   Her latest novel, Count the Ways, was published in 2021.  Maynard is the founder of Write by the Lake, a week-long workshop on the art and craft of memoir, held every year since 2001 at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala