We are pleased to announce the addition of David Nasaw to our roster of panelists for 2009's Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Nasaw is the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent publication is Andrew Carnegie, awarded the 2007 New York Historical Society Prize in American History and chosen as a "notable" book of 2006 by the New York Times and a "best" book of the year by the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Business Week, and Library Journal. Nasaw has also been awarded the Bancroft Prize for History, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for Non-Fiction, the Ambassador Book Prize for Biography, and the Sperber Prize for Biography. Professor Nasaw is a historian of the first rank, and his participation in the Seminar adds heft to what promises to be a lively discussion of truth, "truth," and truths among novelists and historians alike.

Click here for David Nasaw's complete biography, bibliography, and links to published interviews.

We are very happy to announce that Madison Smartt Bell will be with us in January, for our twenty-seventh annual Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth.

History, of course, is ever-unfurling. We're living it right now. Fiction offers a focusing lens whereby the sense of a distant historical epoch may be rendered more clear. One point of access into our theme is by paying attention to what's going on in the world, and considering the relevance of this or that soon-to-be-historical issue to the work of our assembled roster of historical fiction writers and historians. In regards to Madison Smartt Bell, the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels which chart the Haitian revolution of 1791-1803, it is worthwhile to think of the recent and current travails of our neighbor, Haiti. A front-page piece in this Sunday's New York Times examines the current trend of nostalgia for the reign of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the notorious despot who, together with his father, François, terrorized the people of Haiti for more than 20 years. While Bell's focus has tended to land deeper in the Haitian past, an awareness of Haiti's twentieth century deepens the ultimate tragedy of the histories Bell has chosen to recreate. We'll be looking more into Bell's work here soon. In the meantime, the interview with him here gives some insight into his pursuit of Haitian history through the means of historical fiction.