A Conversation with Author JENNIFER SAVRAN KELLY

I was born and raised on Long Island in New York. My family moved around the island quite a bit, so I'm always interested in the idea of home. Is it a place or a feeling? Can it be lost or taken away? Undermined? Or is it something we make for ourselves? In my writing, I think this translates to the idea of foundational beliefs. I like to explore what happens when the foundational beliefs of my characters are shaken. Do they fold with the debris or rise from it changed, for better or worse?

A Conversation with Author JENNIFER KABAT

I grew up in a modernist subdivision of glass houses outside Washington, DC. And it was a bastion of left leaning values, where also nature --inside/outside--boundaries disappeared. It has a bylaw preventing fences, and its earliest residents created cooperatives for everything. That porousness and permeability, that sense of dissolving into the world around me, feels central to my writing and thinking, but so too politics. And then there is that wild Modernist dream (the one conveyed in, say, architecture and design, not so much the literature) that our stuff could change the world. It's radical and strange and a fairytale realm. Maybe not so surprisingly after my parents died, I wanted to rebuild their home in a field in upstate NY - which was the starting point in some ways for both The Eighth Moon and Nightshining.