LITERATURE + LECTURES

Blue Willow Bookshop presents a book signing and discussion by Amanda Eyre Ward.

We welcome author Amanda Eyre Ward for a return visit to Blue Willow. Amanda, author of book club favorite Sleep Toward Heaven, will be in town to discuss and sign her newest book, Love Stories in this Town.

From a cabin in Maine to a comedy club in Manhattan; from a diner in Montana to a raft rushing through the Grand Canyon, acclaimed author Amanda Eyre Ward brings us twelve stories about love in all of its complexity, absurdity, and glory with Love Stories in This Town.

On the banks of Messalonskee Lake, a family tragedy forces Bill and Lizzy to take a hard look at their own lives. Casey, a suburban New Yorker with a wry sense of humor, braves the dating scene after losing her husband. Annie, a librarian in a small mining town, must choose between the only home she's ever known and the possibility of a new life. In San Francisco and Houston and Savannah, Ward's characters search for the place where they truly belong. And in six dazzling stories spanning a decade of her life, Lola Wilkerson mends a broken heart and then meets Emmett Chase.

In stories as evocative as they are striking, Amanda Eyre Ward once again proves herself an astute interpreter of emotions both familiar and strange. Whether exploring the fierceness of a mother's love or the consolations of marriage, Ward's stories are imbued with humor, clear-eyed insight, and emotional richness.

Amanda Eyre Ward was born in New York City in 1972. Her family moved to Rye, New York when she was four. Amanda attended Kent School in Kent, CT, where she wrote for the Kent News.

Amanda majored in English and American Studies at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. She studied fiction writing with Jim Shepard and spent her junior fall in coastal Kenya. She worked part-time at the Williamstown Public Library. After graduation, Amanda taught at Athens College in Greece for a year, and then moved to Missoula, Montana.

Amanda studied fiction writing at the University of Montana with Bill Kittredge, Dierdre McNamer, Debra Earling, and Kevin Canty, receiving her MFA. After traveling to Egypt, she took a job at the University of Montana Mansfield Library, working in Inter Library Loan.

In 1998, Amanda moved to Austin, Texas where she began working on Sleep Toward Heaven. She wrote for the Austin Chronicle and worked for a variety of Internet startups. In 1999, Amanda won third prize in the Austin Chronicle short story contest with her story Miss Montana’s Wedding Day.

She published Butte as in Beautiful that same year.

In July, 2000, Amanda married the geologist Tip Meckel in Ouray, Colorado.

They spent a summer in New Orleans, Louisiana, where Amanda wrote the short stories The Beginning of the Wrong Novel and Classified.

During that summer, Amanda finished Sleep Toward Heaven, which was published in 2003. Sleep Toward Heaven won the Violet Crown Book Award and was optioned for film by Sandra Bullock and Fox Searchlight. To promote Sleep Toward Heaven, Amanda, her baby, and her mother Mary-Anne Westley traveled to London and Paris.

Amanda moved to Waterville, Maine, where she wrote in an attic filled with books. Amanda’s second novel, How to Be Lost, was published in 2004. How to Be Lost was selected as a Target Bookmarked pick, and has been published in fifteen countries.

After one year in Maine and two years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Amanda and her family returned to Austin, Texas.

To research her third novel, Forgive Me, Amanda traveled with her sister, Liza Ward Bennigson, to Cape Town, South Africa. Forgive Me was published in 2007.

Amanda's short story collection, Love Stories in This Town, will be published on April 21, 2009.

Amanda currently writes every morning and spends afternoons with her two young boys.