Mary Kay Zuravleff is the author of The Frequency of Souls, winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award; The Bowl Is Already Broken, which The New York Times called, “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming”; and Man Alive!, a Washington Post Notable Book. Her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Washingtonian, Atlantic, and LA Times Book Review, and she has received multiple DC Artist Fellowships, including for 2023. American Ending was inspired by her grandparents, immigrants of the Old Believer Russian Orthodox faith brought here to mine coal in Appalachia.

Zuravleff will be in conversation with Alice McDermott. McDermott's latest novel, Absolution, will be published in November by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She is the author of eight previous novels and a book of essays, What About the Baby?, praised as “a master class on fiction.” Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction, and three of her books, After This, At Weddings and Wakes and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories, essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and Harpers.