In her new novel, The Great Divide, Cristina Henríquez tells the stories of the migrant workers, locals, and others affected by the Panama Canal project in 1907. Ben Fountain’s new novel Devil Makes Three follows a young man during the 1991 coup d’etat in Haiti. Join these authors for a discussion about writing historical events, researching and creating characters, and what happens when the world changes.
Photo Credit: Thorne Anderson
Ben Fountain’s work has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction; the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a Whiting Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He lives in Dallas. His latest book is Devil Makes Three.
Photo Credit: Brian McConkey
Cristina Henríquez is the author of The Book of Unknown Americans, The World In Half, and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories. She has been longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, Oxford American, American Scholar, and elsewhere. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Illinois. Her latest book is The Great Divide.
Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the story collections The Disappeared (Knopf) and The Theory of Light and Matter (Vintage) and the novels In Between Days (Knopf) and The Imagined Life (Knopf, forthcoming in 2025). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been read on public radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
Photo Credit: Sarah E Cooper Photography
