Marlene Wagman-Geller is a bestselling author known for her work in writing about phenomenal women and their impact on civilization. Since publishing her debut book in 2008, she has gone on to write popular feminist books such as Still I Rise, Women of Means, and Women Who Launch, which were reviewed by The New York Times and The Huffington Post. Wagman-Geller currently lives in sunny San Diego with her husband and Persian cat, and teaches English when not writing her next book about famous women in history. A native of New Hampshire, Joyce Maynard began publishing her stories in magazines when she was thirteen years old. She first came to national attention with the publication of her New York Times cover story, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life,” in 1972, when she was a freshman at Yale. Since then, she has been a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, a syndicated newspaper columnist whose “Domestic Affairs” column appeared in over fifty papers nationwide, a regular contributor to NPR and national magazines including Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and many more, and a longtime performer with The Moth. Maynard is the author of seventeen books, including the novel To Die For and the bestselling memoir, At Home in the World—translated into sixteen languages. Her novel, To Die For was adapted for the screen by Buck Henry for a film directed by Gus Van Sant, in which Joyce can be seen in the role of Nicole Kidman’s lawyer. Her novel Labor Day was adapted and directed by Jason Reitman for a film starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin, to whom Joyce offered instruction for making the pie that appeared in a crucial scene in the film. The mother of three grown children, Maynard runs workshops in memoir at her home in Lafayette, California. In 2002 she founded The Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, where she hosts a weeklong workshop in personal storytelling every winter. She is a fellow of The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo.
“The book you hold in your hands is about the places where women of accomplishment (mostly renown and in one or two instances, infamy) have not only lived but worked. This has to do not only with their desks and writing spaces of course (if they were writers; some whose spaces are explored here were not) but with the whole environment of the houses in which they carried on their lives.” —Joyce Maynard, author of Count the Ways