Sunday, June 29, 2025 @ 8:00 am Eastern- Join your fellow readers and book lovers and listen to some of the year’s best authors/narrators from RUSA book and media award winners and Best of Lists Authors/narrators discuss their works and the craft of writing as well as sign books immediately following the event. Registration is required. Continental Breakfast will be provided. Register here today for this RUSA Ticketed Event at ALA Annual Conference.
Generously sponsored by: Ingram Library Services
Confirmed Authors:
Anne Byrn, Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories
A New York Times bestselling food writer and author, Anne Byrn writes the weekly newsletter Between the Layers, one of the top 20 food and drink newsletters worldwide on Substack. She has authored several cookbooks. Her latest books are A New Take on Cake and Skillet Love, the latter exploring the history and modern uses for the cast-iron skillet. They followed American Cookie and American Cake, which NPR named one of the best cookbooks of 2016. The Cake Mix Doctor and sequels have more than 4 million copies in print, and USA Today called The Cake Mix Doctor the bestselling cookbook the year it debuted. She and her husband live in Nashville.
Ari Fliakos, I’m Starting to Worry about this Black Box of Doom
Ari Fliakos has narrated books by John Updike, Ray Bradbury, Paul Newman, John Grisham, Jodie Picoult, Jonathan Safron Foer, Jason Pargin, Richard Price, Daryl Gregory, Don Winslow, Eric Rickstad and James Patterson. He was named Audible’s Narrator of the Year in 2017 and narrated “Audiobook of the Year” The Nix, by Nathan Hill. Ari’s TV and film work includes Homeland, FBI, New Amsterdam, Mysteries of Laura, Company K and Limitless. He graduated from Duke University with a major in Chinese History.
.Chris Heath, No Road Leading Back: An Improbably Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust
Award-winning journalist CHRIS HEATH has written about a wide array of subjects for GQ, The Atlantic, Esquire and Vanity Fair. His story “18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio.” won the 2013 National Magazine Award for Reporting; his story “The Militiamen, the Governor and the Kidnapping That Wasn’t” was nominated for the 2023 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. He has also written about popular culture, including the books Pet Shop Boys, Literally and the 2004 UK bestseller Feel, about British pop star Robbie Williams. He co-wrote the lyrics for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Boy in the Dress, which premiered in Stratford in November 2019. Based in Brooklyn, Heath grew up south of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
.Yume Kitasei, The Stardust Grail
Yume Kitasei is the author of The Deep Sky and The Stardust Grail. She is Japanese and American and grew up in a space between two cultures—the same space where her stories reside. She lives in Brooklyn with two cats, Boondoggle and Filibuster. Her stories have appeared in publications including New England Review, Catapult, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Baltimore Review.
.Helen Laser, All This and More
Helen Laser is an audiobook narrator, voice artist, and actor of stage and screen. In the audiobook world, she is an Audie Award Finalist, SOVAS finalist, LA Times Book Awards Finalist, and multiple Audiofile Earphones Award winner. Her narration has been picked by Reese Witherspoon for her book club, and has made many best-of lists including features by (but not limited to): Audible, Apple, Libro.fm, Amazon, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture, and many more. She is a proud member of SAG-AFTRA.
.Diane McKinney-Whetstone, Family Spirit
Diane McKinney-Whetstone is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Tumbling, Tempest Rising, Blues Dancing, Leaving Cecil Street,Trading Dreams at Midnight, Lazaretto and Our Gen. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Literary Award for Fiction, which she won twice. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband. Her forthcoming novel, Family Spirit is about a very eccentric family of clairvoyants, whose “gifts” date back to the late 1700s. Think Alice Hoffman’s beloved Magic series meets Gloria Naylor’s classic supernatural novel Mama Day and you’ve got FAMILY SPIRIT.
Register here today for this RUSA Ticketed Event at ALA Annual Conference.
-To add this and other ticketed events to your ALA Annual Conference Registration simply click on the dashboard link in your confirmation email.
For all other questions or comments related to RUSA events at Annual, contact Ninah Moore, RUSA Program Officer-Continuing Education, at nmoore@ala.org