MJCC Author Series

Mary Morris – Gateway to the Moon

From award-winning novelist and memoirist Mary Morris comes the story of a sleepy New Mexican community that must come to grips with a religious and political inheritance they never expected. Morris is the author of numerous works of fiction, including the novels The Jazz Palace, A Mother’s Love, and House Arrest, and of nonfiction, including the travel memoir classic “Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone.” She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in literature and the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Award for Fiction.

Mark Sarvas

A son learns more about his father than he ever could have imagined when a mysterious piece of art is unexpectedly restored to him. Of all the questions asked by Sarvas’s Memento Park – about family and identity, about art and history–a central, unanswerable predicament lingers: How do we move forward when the past looms unreasonably large? Sarvas is the author of Memento Park and Harry, Revised, which was published in more than a dozen countries. His book reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, Bookforum and many others.

Michael David Lukas

The Last Watchman of Old Cairo is a moving page-turner of a novel from acclaimed storyteller Michael David Lukas. This tightly woven multigenerational tale illuminates the tensions that have torn communities apart and the unlikely forces–potent magic, forbidden love–that boldly attempt to bridge that divide. Lukas is the author of the international bestselling novel The Oracle of Stamboul, which was a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and has been published in fifteen languages. A graduate of Brown University, he has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.