The Friends of the Concord Free Public Library present the 2024 Breakfast with the Authors panel, which will take place at Concord's Colonial Inn, 48 Monument Square. The event will be moderated by local author and physician, Dr. Suzanne Koven.

Tickets are $30 in advance or $35 at the door, as available. CFA Breakfast tickets will be sold locally at the Barrow Bookstore as well as online on the CFA website. This event includes a full buffet breakfast at Concord’s Colonial Inn.

Steve Almond is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His recent books include the novel All the Secrets of the World, which has been optioned for television by 20th Century Fox, and William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life. For four years, Steve hosted the New York Times Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed. He is the recipient of a 2022 NEA grant in fiction, and his short stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Erotica, and Best American Mysteries series. He also publishes crazy DIY books. Almond was raised in Palo Alto, California, graduated from Henry M. Gunn High School and received his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University. He spent seven years as a newspaper reporter, mostly in El Paso and at the Miami New Times. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with his wife and three children.

Crystal King is an author, culinary enthusiast and marketing expert. Her writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food, language and culture of Italy. She has taught classes in writing, creativity and social media at Harvard Extension School, Boston University, Mass College of Art, UMass Boston and GrubStreet, one of the leading creative writing centers in the U.S. A Pushcart-nominated poet and former co-editor of the online literary arts journal Plum Ruby Review, Crystal received her M.A. in Critical and Creative Thinking from UMass Boston, where she developed a series of exercises and writing prompts to help fiction writers in medias res. King grew up in the Pacific Northwest and now calls Boston home. She considers Italy her next great love, after her husband, Joe, and their two cats, Nero and Merlin.

Margot Livesey has published nine novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona, The House on Fortune Street, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Mercury, and The Boy in the Field. Her tenth novel, The Road from Belhaven, was published in February 2024 by Knopf. The Hidden Machinery, a collection of essays on writing, was published by Tin House Books in 2017. Margot has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Margot is currently teaching at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Livesey grew up in a boys’ private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published by Penguin Canada in 1986. Livesey lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.

Suzanne Koven, longtime host of the CFA Breakfast with the Authors, received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The New Yorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. Her monthly column “In Practice” appeared in the Boston Globe and won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association in 2012. Her interview column, “The Big Idea,” appears at The Rumpus. Suzanne conducts workshops, moderates panel discussions, and speaks to a variety of audiences about literature and medicine, narrative and storytelling in medicine, women’s health, mental healthcare, and primary care and co-directs the Media and Medicine Certificate Program at Harvard Medical School. Suzanne’s essay collection, Letter to a Young Female Physician, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2021. Koven was born and raised in New York City. After her residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital, she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and has practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for over 30 years.

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Friends of the Concord Free Public Library, a patron-supported non-profit organization.
Learn more and support the Friends’ work.