Alice McDermott’s latest novel, Absolution, was an instant NY Times bestseller, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and named one of the best books of 2023 by Time, NPR, LA Times, Vogue and others. Her eight previous novels have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dublin IMPAC Award. Her novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction. She is also the author of What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times, Commonweal and elsewhere. For over two decades she was the Richard A. Mackey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the faculty of the Sewanee Writers Conference.