VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
STRAIGHT: Strangest thing that ever happened to me at a reading was when my first novel came out, my husband and I decided to do a camping book tour with a one year old and three year old, and we arrived in SF with me wearing dirty jeans and a dirtier jean jacket, so the audience at Black Oak in Berkeley thought my elegant, purple-turbaned escort was the novelist and cheered for her. I wanted to pay her to read for me.
Susan Straight has published eight novels and two books for children. Her novel Between Heaven and Here (McSweeneys, 2013) is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room (Anchor Books) was named one of the best books of 2010 by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, and A Million Nightingales (Anchor Books) was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2006. Highwire Moon was a Finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher,” published in Los Angeles Noir, won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in The O Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harpers, McSweeneys, The Believer, Salon, Zoetrope, Black Clock, and elsewhere. She has been awarded The Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times, The Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UCRiverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com.
Come see Susan read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, November 11 at 7:30pm