Celebrity Authors Luncheon

Date: Saturday, March 4, 2017

Time: 10:00 AM
Location: Fess Parker’s Doubletree Resort and Hotel

Individual tickets are $150

Fannie Flagg’s career started in the fifth grade when she wrote, directed, and starred in her first play, titled The Whoopee Girls, and she has not stopped since. At age nineteen she began writing and producing television specials, and later wrote for and appeared on Candid Camera. She then went on to distinguish herself as an actress and a writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the bestselling author of Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man; Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe; Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!; Standing in the Rainbow; A Redbird Christmas; Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven; I Still Dream About You; and The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion. Flagg’s script for the movie Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for an Academy Award and the Writers Guild of America Award and won the highly regarded Scripter Award for best screenplay of the year. Flagg is the winner of the Harper Lee Prize. Flagg lives happily in California and Alabama.

Dianne Dixon is a double Emmy nominee and winner of the prestigious Humanitas prize for outstanding accomplishment in writing for television. She was Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Pitzer College in Claremont, California and has taught screenwriting at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film & Media. The Other Sister is Dianne’s third novel. Her second novel The Book of Someday was a featured 2013 Buzz Book at the largest publishing trade fair in the US. And her debut novel The Language of Secrets was named a Top Ten New Fiction title by Amazon.

Craig Johnson is the author of eight novels in the Walt Longmire mystery series, which has garnered popular and critical acclaim. The Cold Dish was a Dilys Award finalist and the French edition won Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/BibliObs. Death Without Company, the Wyoming State Historical Association’s Book of the Year, won France’s Le Prix 813. Another Man’s Moccasins was the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award winner and the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers’ Book of the Year, and The Dark Horse, the fifth in the series, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. Junkyard Dogs won the Watson Award for a mystery novel with the best sidekick, and Hell Is Empty, selected by Library Journal as the Best Mystery of the Year, was a New York Times best seller, as was As the Crow Flies. The Walt Longmire series is the basis for the hit A&E drama, Longmire, starring Robert Taylor, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Katee Sackoff. Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming, population twenty-five.

Kate McDermott is an award-winning self-taught home baker who has taught pie making to thousands across the United States and in Europe at her Art of the Pie workshops and Pie Camps. McDermott has been featured in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Huffington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, Alaska Airlines Magazine, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Relish Magazine, New York Times, Boston Globe, Saveur Magazine, Bon Appetit, The Splendid Table, NPR, and Oprah.com. Her first book, Art of the Pie, was awarded a coveted starred review by Publisher’s Weekly, is a Library Journal Best Book of 2016, Leite’s Culinaria Best Cookbook of 2016, Atlanta Journal-Constitution Best Cookbooks of 2016, Eat Your Books Best Cookbooks of 2016, Washington Post Best Cookbooks of 2016, InStyle Best Fall 2016 Cookbooks, Epicurious.com Best Cookbooks of 2016, and Sunset Magazine’s November 2016 Cookbook of the Month. She lives at Pie Cottage in Port Angeles, Washington with her sweet German Shepherd Gretapie.

Non-Interviewed Authors

Marina Delio The Yummy Mummy Kitchen
Kathie Deviny Death in the Old Rectory
Judith Groudine Finkel Where Danger Lurks
John Gherini Santa Cruz Island, An Illustrated History
Erin Graffy de Garcia & Tom Mielko Animalia, Portraits in Poetry & Pencil
Kim Hooper People Who Knew Me
Patti Jacquemain Heads & Tales
Bruce Kirkpatrick Lumberjack Jesus
Eric Peterson The Dining Car
Judi Zucker & Shari Zucker The Memory Diet

Master of Ceremonies: Andrew Firestone

Interviewers:

Susan Miles Gulbransen, daughter of CALM founder Claire Miles, will be interviewing Fannie Flagg.
Hank Phillippi Ryan and Tom Weitzel will interview Dianne Dixon, Craig Johnson, and Kate McDermott.
Hank Phillippi Ryan will be signing her newest book “Say No More”

Please direct questions to Laura Barella at (805) 969-5590.