A Night of Nonfiction: Debut CNF Author Readings & Discussions – Summer 2024

Annabelle Tometich went from medical-school reject to line cook to journalist to author. She spent 18 years as a food writer and restaurant critic for The News-Press in her hometown of Fort Myers, Florida. Her first book, “The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony” (April 2024, Little Brown) was called “sweet, sharp” by The New York Times.

Tometich’s writing has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, Catapult, the Tampa Bay Times, and many more outlets. She has won more than a dozen awards for her stories, including first place for Food & Travel Writing at the 2022 Sunshine State Awards. She (still) lives in Fort Myers with her husband, two children, and her ever-fiery Filipina mother.

Growing up, Audrey Jean (she/her) knew she was going to be an author one day, she just wasn’t sure how. Or when. Let alone of what. But there was always something to say, and she was keen to find a way to say it. Her next book, which she hopes won’t be as depressing as this one, is planned for a 2025 release, and will be her first foray into fiction (and romance!).When she’s not writing something or other, you can usually find her trying to make a dent in her ever-growing TBR pile, working on training her cats to take walks, or stewing over a new cookbook with flour inevitably streaked over her front.

If that doesn’t work, look in the mirror, spin around twice while saying, “Do you want to watch the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice?” and she’ll show up behind you with a bottle of wine, ready to go.

If you’re interested in connecting and seeing what’s coming next, you can find her at: audreyjean.net | Instagram: audreyjean_writes

Carole Duff is a veteran teacher, flutist, naturalist, and writer of creative nonfiction. She posts weekly to her long-standing blog Notes from Vanaprastha and has written for Brevity blog, Huffington Post, Mockingbird, Please See Me, Streetlight Magazine, The Perennial Gen now The Sage Forum, for which she is a regular contributor, and other publications. Her book Wisdom Builds Her House releases August 20,, 2024. Carole lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with her husband, another third-stage-of-life, debut author K.A. Kenny (The Starflower), and two, large overly-friendly dogs. You can contact Carole through her website: caroleduff.com.

A first-generation Hong Kong Canadian writer based in Berlin, Isaac Yuen’s short fiction and creative nonfiction has been published in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Orion, Pleiades, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Shenandoah, and of course, Hippocampus, among other places. He was a nature writer-in-residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Literature in Switzerland, a Science Meets Fiction fellow at the HWK Institute in Advanced Study in Germany, and will be an upcoming artist-in-residence with the La Napoule Foundation in France. Utter, Earth: Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World is his debut essay collection.

Zoë Bossiere (they/she) is writer from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and the coeditor of two anthologies: The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins. Bossiere’s debut, Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir chronicles their experiences growing up as a trans boy in a Tucson, Arizona trailer park.

Lilly Dancyger is the author of First Love: Essays on Friendship (The Dial Press, 2024), a collection of personal and critical essays about the power and complexity of female friendship; and Negative Space (SFWP, 2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards. She lives in New York City, and is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, Off Assignment, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She writes the Substack newsletter The Word Cave.

Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of Mama, Mama, Only Mama: An Irreverent Guide for the Newly Single Parent; Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home, and co-editor of the anthology, Feminine Rising. Her essay collection: The Truth About Unringing Phones, releases March 2024 with Unsolicited Press.