KGB Bar

Author Teri Coyne (The Last Bridge, Ballantine) and ground-breaking web community SHE WRITES co-host the second in a series of literary events entitled, “Ordinary Women: Extraordinary Heroines - A New Paradigm for the Modern Heroine.”

Featured authors include Terese Svoboda (Cannibal), Diane Meier (The Season of Second Chances) and Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant (Uptown).  The event will expose a roster of fresh female characters who are often flawed but willful protagonists, who use their intelligence and wit (and sometimes socially-inappropriate survival skills) to achieve self-actualization.  The evening promises to be filled with great stories, insights and engaging discussions.

Teri Coyne’s novel, The Last Bridge, was named a Target Breakout Book and called, “…a compelling debut…” (Publishers Weekly) and a “…psychological tour de force…” (Booklist). Writing since she received her first typewriter on her 10th birthday, she studied poetry with Philip Shultz, novel writing at Iowa Summer Writers Workshop, memoir with Frank McCourt and fiction with Masha Hamilton. A former stand-up comedienne, she also explored filmmaking, playwriting, acting, producing and directing. Teri lives in New York. (www.tericoyne.com) The paperback of The Last Bridge is available on May 25th.

Diane Meier is a marketing guru, author of The New American Wedding and president of MEIER, a NYC-based marketing firm whose clients have helped define luxury marketing (from Neiman Marcus and DeBeers to Maximilan Furs, Kohler, Elizabeth Arden and Pierre Balmain). Her career has honed skills from strategy, writing and design to public speaking. Married to best selling author and BBC broadcaster, Frank Delaney, she has had much to observe about writing and speaking - from a front row seat. Her new book, The Season of Second Chances, hit shelves on March 30, 2010.  (www.dianemeier.com)

Terese Svoboda’s writing has been featured in The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate.com, Bomb, Lit, Columbia, Yale Review and The Paris Review. Her honors include an O. Henry for the short story, a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, a translation NEH fellowship, a PEN/Columbia Fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in poetry and fiction, a New York State Council on the Arts grant and a Jerome Foundation grant in video, the John Golden Award in playwriting, the Bobst Prize in fiction and the Iowa Prize in poetry. A University of British Columbia and Columbia graduate, she has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Fordham, Williams, the College of William and Mary, the University of Hawaii, the University of Miami, Fairleigh Dickenson, the New School, St. Petersburg, Russia, Nairobi, and held the McGee Professorship at Davidson College. Here new book, Pirate Talk, or Mermalade, will be released in September 2010. (www.teresesvoboda.com)

With seven novels to their credit, Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, best friends for nearly 30 years, have turned a friendship into one of the most successful and enduring writing collaborations in contemporary women’s fiction. Their first mainstream novel, Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made, was a critical success, an Essence Bestseller and won the Merit Award for Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Far From the Tree became a New York Times Bestseller. Their subsequent books, Better Than I Know Myself, Gotta Keep on Tryin’, a sequel to Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made and What Doesn’t Kill You, have all been national best sellers. Their latest novel, Uptown, hit shelves in March, 2010.

She Writes is the leading online destination for women writers today. Since its inception in June 2009, more than 8000 women writers from more than thirty countries and all fifty states, including many bestselling and award-winning authors, have been sharing support, organizing their knowledge, and doing business on She Writes. A unique community where women writers can create networks and get the services and support they need at every stage of their writing lives, She Writes is a business on a mission: to forever transform the landscape in which women write, publish, and read. We believe writing has the power to change the lives of women; we believe that when women write and publish, they have the power to change the world. She Writes is the brainchild of founder Kamy Wicoff, an author and salonniere based in New York City, and her founding partner Deborah Siegel, an author and blogger.